Modern Fashions for Modern Women: The Evolution of New York Sportswear in the 1930s

Abstract

This article aims to establish the significance and diversity of sportswear styles designed and manufactured in New York during the 1930s. It will assert that the 1930s was a crucial period in New York sportswear's evolution. This decade tends to be overlooked by fashion historians, who either make generalisations about American fashion in the 1930s or focus on developments in the 1940s. This article will demonstrate that the Depression era was central to sportswear's emergence as a key form of affordable, mass-produced clothing, which comprised simple, interchangeable garments that could be worn in a variety of settings. This article will establish the importance of the 1930s as a period when New York sportswear was crystallised as a design and marketing ideal. This was due to both the economic pressures of the 1930s, which made cheaper mass-produced clothing more appealing, and to shifts within the fashion industry, which saw more co-ordinated attempts to promote indigenous design. Sportswear will be discussed in terms of three key categories: active sportswear, town and country wear and resort wear. Surviving dress from American and British collections will be analysed to demonstrate the importance of these categories, and the ways in which they came to form an ideal of Americanness through their design aesthetic, as well as the way they were advertised. Garments by manufacturers such as Davidow, and designers such as Clare Potter, will be contrasted with examples from London and Paris to show how New York was gradually to evolve its own distinct styles, which would in the following decade be characterised by the term the 'American Look'. The clean lines and machine aesthetic of this style were mythologised as an expression of American national identity — as practical, rational and authentic. As the 1930s wore on, New York sportswear was increasingly linked to modern lifestyles, and thus was portrayed as ideal for women who were active, whether as college girls, housewives, career women, or through travel. The notion of femininity that it evoked linked to white, middle-class ideals, and existing assumptions about American fashion's 'democratic' approach that eschewed the élitism of European fashion therefore need to be questioned.

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