Radical Feminist 20th-Century Fashion at the CAM

Photography by Rob Deslongchamps

Beginning April 24, the Cincinnati Art Museum will showcase a free exhibition featuring more than 50 garments designed and created by Elizabeth Hawes, a radical American fashion designer, author, and social commentator active from the 1920s to the 1960s.

The exhibition, Elizabeth Hawes: Radical American Fashion, marks the first major museum presentation of Hawes’s work. CAM holds the second-largest collection of her work in the world—just behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Many of the colorful, intricate dresses on display at CAM are composed of silk, linen, or cotton and showcase progressively bold and unique designs, particularly for the era of their creation.

Hawes designed pieces that were not only beautiful but also very functional for the wearer. Megan Nauer, acting curator of fashion arts and textiles at the CAM, says the designer was an early proponent of “Ready-to-Wear” clothing. Fast fashion was still decades from Hawes’s time, but even back then, she wanted pieces that were high quality, well-designed, affordable, and readily available for people to purchase.

Photograph by Mary Morris Lawrence, 1941.

“She was also always really forward-thinking about gender and how men and women dress,” Nauer says, “and how we could come to a more non-gendered, neutral understanding of what people needed out of their clothes.”

Photography by Rob Deslongchamps

In her 1954 book titled It’s Still Spinach—a follow-up to her landmark 1938 book Fashion is Spinach, a critique of the fashion industry—Hawes says that “men’s clothes will really be revolutionized when the male asserts his right to be considered as alluring and decorative and beautiful as women.” According to the Fashion Institute of Technology, Hawes urged people to question the mid-20th-century societal norms of clothing and encouraged others to develop their personal styles based on self-expression—not conformity.

“I really hope that people think about how this designer was thinking about issues that we still grapple with today,” Nauer says. “She was telling us all the way back in the 1930s that clothing should be made of strong design principles—it should be made to last. It should not be a fad that you wear and discard.”

Cynthia Amnéus, the former curator of fashion arts and textiles at the CAM, retired earlier this year after a 25-year career. She spent more than a decade researching Hawes’s designs and prolific writing, and is the curator of this exhibition. Nauer says Amnéus first encountered Hawes’s work in a magazine.

Photography by Rob Deslongchamps

Hawes wrote nine books in her lifetime about fashion and its role in American life, and worked for multiple publications including The New Yorker, Detroit Free Press, and The Baltimore Sun. “I think that her social commentary is what really drew Cynthia’s interest in the beginning, “Nauer says. “[And,] I think her avant-garde methods of constructing these garments were something that, when Cynthia sort of paired with her writing, piqued her interest.”

After Hawes shut down her couture house in 1940, she began a very diverse career journey. She began writing for left-leaning PM magazine, worked in an aircraft factory during World War II, and eventually became a labor organizer for auto workers.

Elizabeth Hawes: Radical American Fashion will be on display from April 24 to August 2 in the Cincinnati Art Museum’s Thomas R. Schiff Galleries (234 and 235). Admission is free.