Finding Style in History

**This transcript comes from a previous broadcast. There may be small changes between the audio you hear above and the text.**

BRIAN: Ben Franklin, may have succeeded in influencing French trends in hat wear, but as late as the 20th century, Americans continued looking to Europe, and especially France for their fashion guidance. When war broke out across the continent in 1914, the European clothing industry switched gears and devoted itself instead to serving military needs. And this created a bit of a crisis among fashion minded Americans.

ANN MARGUERITE TARTSINIS: Periodicals, in New York especially, were kind of decrying the situation, saying that there’s no real American design, and there’s no direction coming from Europe now.

BRIAN: This is Ann Marguerite Tartsinis, a curator at the Bard Graduate Center in New York City. She says that where some saw crisis, others in New York’s art and museum circle, saw an opportunity. Like Arthur Wesley Dow, an influential professor of art education at Columbia University.

MALE SPEAKER: It is time we throw off these shackles and endeavor to express ourselves in our own way. Our design should be distinctively American. We ought to create a new period style for our own needs. We Americans can make an art use with the naivete’s of the mountain builders cliff dwellers, Pueblo tribes, Alaskans, Mayans, and Peruvians.

ANN MARGUERITE TARTSINIS: So he’s conflating all these different communities. He’s lumpy and all of this indigenous material together and seeing it as a way to really throttle American design into the forefront.

BRIAN: If you’re in New York City and you want to infuse some pre-Colombian flavor into the local fashion scene, where do you go for inspiration? How about the American Museum of Natural History? A small group of anthropologists there were convinced that they held the key to unlocking the future of American design.

ANN MARGUERITE TARTSINIS: Curators felt that objects in the collections could be seen as examples to inspire and educate designers. To create something new and create something that was wholly separate from Europe.

BRIAN: In 1915, these curators opened up their specimen storage rooms, and they invited influential New York designers behind the scenes to see what real American design was all about.

ANN MARGUERITE TARTSINIS: They were even letting fashion designers pin hide jackets and Siberian coats to dress forms so they could model their contemporary designs after these more historical and indigenous designs. They also started a very ambitious design contest series which started in 1916 and ran until 1922. And the mission of these contests was to get these designs being made by the designers, who were interested and ambitious enough to use the collections at the museum as inspiration for their own work, to get those designs out into manufacture.

BRIAN: And believe it or not, some of these designs made their way to market. In 1917 the John Wanamaker department store unveiled a showroom called Modern Maya Made. It contained dresses, coats, and hats, that integrated native textiles into contemporary fashion design. Now, looking to the past for inspiration was not a new idea in fashion design. In fact European designers had also drawn on various folk customs. But back in Europe, this chain of influence was a little less complicated. The designers, or at least the people buying their clothes, could in many cases claim a direct family line to the people whose styles they were appropriating. A group of white guys in New York, on the other hand, how could they possibly lay claim to native cultures, Stretching from Alaska to the Amazon.

ANN MARGUERITE TARTSINIS: The curator saw the indigenous communities that they were appropriating as inherently American, arguing that it was in the soil. That it was about the land they were inhabiting, and even though Euro-American culture could lay no claim to the cultures of the indigenous Americas, they made this conceptual leap by thinking about the territory as American.

BRIAN: A 100 years later, this kind of thinking may seem naive, at best. But remember, at the time, ideas about eugenics and the inferiority of non-white races, were very widespread. In this context these anthropologists believe they were taking a powerfully, progressive stand.

ED: In the end, the Modern Myan Made look didn’t exactly catch on, nor for that matter, did any of the other mash ups of native cultures that the anthropologists were trying to promote. But there’s a coda to this story. In the 1970s, American fashion designers again turned to the now controversial practice of indigenous appropriation. But this time, says Tartsinis, American consumers were buying.

ANN MARGUERITE TARTSINIS: There’s an explosion of design that looks to particularly the indigenous American material. You see it in fringed garments and hide jackets. It’s this vision of iconic American Indian with the headrest as being this kind of definitive American vision. And you see designers like Giorgio Sant’Angelo, and Ralph Lauren, kind of looking to the American West as a source for design. And you see it again even recently, in recent years Donna Karan, her runway was filled with fringe garments. Right. So it’s this kind of a Western ideal of the American landscape and the people who inhabit It. And that finds its way into the clothing. And then eventually is distilled into kind of every day dress,

BRIAN: That’s Ann Marguerite Tartsinis. Her book and exhibition about the fashions inspired by museum artifacts, is called An American Style: Global Sources for New York Textile and Fashion Design, 1915-1928. You could look at some photos from her exhibit at backstoryradio.org