BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

FASHION

Taking a tip from the man on the job, the wise feminine shipbuilder wears working clothes for comfort and safety. She wears a man’s type shirt with a close fitting collar for protection. Her hair is up . . . she wears strong, serviceable jeans or overalls without cuffs, low-heeled work shoes and a closely fitting jacket for comfort. From “War Fashions for Feminine Safety,” ca. 1942.

This poster, originally put up at a shipbuilder’s yard in San Francisco Bay, was used to headline a 2014 National Archives exhibit on “How World War II Changed Women’s Fashion.” Such thinking achieved fashion apotheosis in the Harper’s Bazaar cover for March 1943. In it, a very cool girl waits patiently to donate her blood to the American Red Cross. Her auburn locks are not covered but tightly controlled by a white cloche hat and framed by her jacket’s high black collar. She carries a rough, reddish hold-all, and she’s determinedly on duty. The picture is headlined “SPRING FASHIONS”, and it was taken by Louise Dahl-Wolfe, by then an established figure in the American fashion trade. The fall of France, in June 1940, destroyed the publishing calendar of Harper’s Bazaar and other leading fashion publications. Their annual lead had always been the great shows of Paris designers. Would they now turn to London for inspiration? Hardly likely. Indeed it was Dahl-Wolfe who led the effort to find an American theme for American women’s fashion. And with more women in the work force (and, be it said, in the forces) American fashion would develop a new look. And Louise Dahl-Wolfe was ready for it. This all-American woman was born in San Francisco, of Norwegian immigrant parents, on November 19, 1895. They wanted all three of their daughters to prosper in this new world, and in Louise’s case they encouraged her artistic tendencies. She studied painting at the California School of Fine Arts, became “bored” with it, and transferred what she’d learned to photography and architecture. In 1927 she took up with a sculptor, Meyer Wolfe, married him in 1928 and (keeping her own surname) moved back to his home country to capture the feel, the taste, and the design of American life. Her first published photo was “Tennessee Mountain Woman,” aged and wrinkled, half in shadow, wearing a man’s black hat decorated with flowers, and sitting on a cabin porch. It brought Dahl-Wolfe back to New York, where she did commissions for Saks and Bonwit-Teller and covers for Harper’s Bazaar—and portraits of some remarkable Americans, including recent ones like Albert Einstein, exiles like Josephine Baker, and oddballs like Carson McCullers. Who better, then, than Louise Dahl-Wolfe to lead and to document a sea change in American fashion? It would give us Rosie the Riveter, and in that March 1943 Bazaar cover, Dahl-Wolfe gave us the 18-year old starlet, Betty Bacall. Renamed “Lauren,” Ms. Bacall would make her own contribution to the changing image of the new (stylish but defiantly American) woman of a new age. ©.