From the end of the 1930s through the 1940s, the New York fashion
industry came into its own. Sportswear, which had evolved from its
sporting origins to include simple casual wear for town and country,
travel and leisure, was at the centre of this shift. Sportswear provided
busy career women, college girls and housewives with clothes that could
be worn on all occasions.Drawing on a wonderful array of sources, from
fashion magazines to department store records, this book is the rich and
absorbing narrative and analysis of how New York sportswear evolved to
become the definitive American style and how a modern fashion aesthetic
was born. The story that unfolds reveals, with the aid of some wonderful
illustrations, how New York's emergent style became dynamic and modern,
like the city itself, expressive of the American ideal of athletic,
long-limbed women; and how it tapped into both metropolitan Americanness
and the America of wide-open spaces.It explores the designers, such as
Claire McCardell, Clare Potter and Tina Leser, themselves embodiments of
the modern, active woman, and how they gave middle class American women
New York sportswear as an alternative to Parisian-inspired designs.
It looks for the first time at how its style connected not just to
ideals of patriotism and democracy, but to current notions of
cleanliness and hygiene, and for example, to 1930s theories of body
image, and contemporary dance.
