I finished a non-audio book! My first one for 2019! I have a decently-sized, heavily-referenced collection of what I call “picture books” on topics like fashion history & patternmaking, but a number of years ago I realized that I prefer to absorb via audio anything that is primarily text (instead of pictures). I gave away nearly all my fiction books a few years back to a teacher friend for her classroom, because I had already replaced most of them with audio versions!

But even with the recent rise in popularity of audiobooks, not quite everything is available as one, especially for the esoteric fashion texts that I’m interested in. So in comes my resolution to read paper books this year! I’ve never felt like I was “cheating” with audio, but I know I’ve been missing out on some content that I would otherwise enjoy. (Plus, I do love to mark up the margins of non-fiction books, a pleasure which I’ve long missed.)

The first paper book I picked up for this was The Lost Art of Dress: The Women Who Once Made America Stylish by Linda Przybyszewski, which had been languishing on my bookshelf for several years. I started reading it when I first purchased it, but I just didn’t have the mental focus at that time to get through it (oh hai depression! thanks for making my brain not work right in lots of different ways!). But I’m almost glad that I waited to read it until now – you know that old saying “When the student is ready, the teacher appears”? That’s EXACTLY what happened.

The last several months I’ve become pretty obsessed with 1920s fashion, and in particular the work of Mary Brooks Picken through the Women’s Institute. When I first bought The Lost Art of Dress, I had no idea who she was, so a lot of the insights in this book went straight over my head! The Women’s Institute published books and mail-order correspondence courses on subjects like dressmaking and cooking, and the materials published on dressmaking are pretty darn awesome. Many are now in the public domain and can be found for free online, or as very inexpensive PDF downloads from vintage pattern sellers.

The Lost Art of Dress doesn’t only focus on Picken and the WI, however. It gives a broad overview of the role that Home Economics played in the US during the early 20th Century. Women were not welcomed in many academic departments during this period, so they used Home Ec departments as a way to apply their scientific and artistic proclivities in a practical setting. They earned their own bureau in the USDA, where female scientists could find employment working on subjects such as Nutritional Health and Textiles.

For better and worse, these so-called “Dress Doctors” were products of their time, and little attention was paid to non-white, non-European standards of beauty. The Lost Art of Dress does a decent job of exploring that, but now I’m interested in finding another book that goes deeply in to this topic. If you have any suggestions, please let me know!

Przybyszewski lays out many of the ideals promoted in designing an appropriate wardrobe in the first half of the 20th century, and I’m planning to reference her distillation as I work on my 1920s capsule wardrobe this year.

Perhaps best of all, this book is written in an engaging tone and is FUNNY, which is rare for academic texts. I think Przybyszewski understands the strange juxtaposition of the serious and frivolous nature of fashion, and that is not lost in her writing.