Fig 1: M.D.C. Crawford, “Museum Documents and Modern Costumes,” The American Museum Journal 18, no.4 1918.

The idea of an “American” design gained momentum in segments of the business, museum and design world during the 1910s and 1920s.¹ Self-conscious interest in the design arts as independent of outside influences is traceable to the origins of the United States as a nation at the expense of England.² This feeling intensified hand in hand with industrial expansion, a pace that quickened in the early twentieth century. With shortages in European design models brought about by World War I, the need to rely more upon local resources for inspiration, materials and manufacturing - to take nothing away from genuine national sentiment - forced the question of identity. Museums were important in this context.³ From the east coast to the mid west in Chicago, Cincinnati, Newark, New York City and Philadelphia, museums actively promoted their holdings as springboards for American design, strengthening bonds or forging new ones with the business community, which took advantage of policies that opened up collections through study rooms, exhibitions and educational programs.

Since revolutionary colonists wore homespun, design as American has been intertwined with women’s clothing.⁴ The early twentieth-century quest for a national design was replicated in fashion as ties with Paris, which held dominance, eroded due to the war. Similarly intent on defining something American, leaders in the feminine apparel industry in New York and New Jersey focused on New York museums for the designing of garments, trim, fabrics and accessories. Today the view about an emerging American fashion centers on the styles of New York manufacturers and designers, but a fundamental achievement was to generate and carry out an idea about a national style, a development more widespread than New York. The use of American Indian collections has a history of its own worth studying for what it reveals about the nature of American fashion as well as national identity, during a time when Euro-Americans increasingly identified with indigenous peoples as true Americans.

Conceptualizing American Fashion
An American fashion was defined from the combined perspective of the business and museum world in the main articulated by M.D.C. Crawford, who bridged both domains. Crawford was a design and research editor for the garment industry’s influential trade paper, Women’s Wear, and a research associate in textiles at the American Museum of Natural History in which capacities he established an alliance between the museum and the garment and textile trades.⁵ By 1917 he had orchestrated the founding of study rooms, lectures and workshops at the museum to the enthusiasm of leading manufacturers and designers, among them from the garment business were Max Meyer of A. Beller & Co., Jessie Franklin Turner of Bonwit Teller, Edward L. Mayer, J. Rapoport, Mary Walls of John Wanamaker's and E. J. Wile; and from the cotton and silk industry were Belding Brothers, Cheney Silk, H. R. Mallinson and Johnson, Cowden & Company.

Crawford worked in close partnership with Stewart Culin, curator of “ethnography” at the Brooklyn Museum.⁶ Under Culin’s leadership the museum opened a study room in 1918 and initiated outreach and programming for the design community, especially in clothing and textiles. For his part Richard Bach at the Metropolitan Museum of Art embraced the wide scope of design.⁷ Rather, Crawford and Culin set the pace in Americanizing fashion.
Through his writing Crawford became an important spokesperson for the fashion and museum world, positing ideas mostly in connection with his institution and its nonwestern holdings, but which mirrored the thinking of museums around the country with their various strands of western and nonwestern objects. This makes clear that fashion gained an American identity by originating in the United States in terms of concept, materials and manufacture. Crawford reveals the intent to create a modern American fashion through an international collection that embraced Africa, the Americas, Asia, the middle East, Europe and the Pacific islands. In a 1917 article in the journal of the American Museum of Natural History, he describes how ready-to-wear and silk and cotton manufacturers looked to the museum for direction, stating that the “Primitive” American art collection and the art of China, the Philippines and South Sea Islands would “...serve as a basis for our own distinctive decorative arts.”⁸ A 1918 article in the same journal entitled “Museum Documents and Modern Costume” explains that:

Instead of the usual method of importing modern foreign costumes [themselves based, generally, on foreign museum collections], our designers, familiar with the practical needs of today, have gone direct to original documents for their inspiration. The work, therefore, marks one of the most important movements in the development of a truly American type of industrial art…⁹

Fig 2: Harry Collins installation at 1919 exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History showing original designs and garments derived from them. Herbert J. Spinden, “Creating a National Art,” The American Museum Journal 19, no.6, Dec. 1919.

The reference to “industrial art” and “modern costume” indicates key aspects in the contemporary understanding of American fashion. The first is advanced technology. The national identity was entwined with the machine. To be an American design was to be produced in American factories with American manufactured materials. Technology was in turn equated with the modern. Although popularly speaking the term “modern” also meant contemporary, the machine represented up-to-date manufacturing methods, and designs intended for industrial production were modern for this reason. The fact is that handicrafts retained importance, but the emphasis was on design for manufacture.¹⁰ It is not coincidental that most garment and textile producers and designers interacting with the American Museum of Natural History and the Brooklyn Museum were engaged in quantity production.

It is tempting to apply to design the tendency of 1910s and 1920s American artists to borrow from Native American and African forms in pursuit of modern solutions to aesthetic problems - read abstraction.¹¹ Although individual designers and manufacturers may have been caught up in being modern, it would be misleading to apply the same agenda to design. Fueled by economic motives, the first objective of design is commerce and thus very different from the undertaking of artists. Taken together the proximity of “ethnographic” collections and the nurturing environment provided by Culin and Crawford cultivated an interest in art outside of western traditions. But this was offset by the utilization of European art at both the Brooklyn Museum and Metropolitan Museum of Art.
What use there was of nonwestern art in modern terms pertained largely to the market appeal of up-to-date styles. This is clear in fashion discourse that alludes to abstraction. “Blouses of Modern American construction. In the popular blouses of today, emphasis is laid on harmonious colors and on designs that have been refined to the point of simplicity,” highlighted designs recalling Northwest Coast traditions.¹²

American Fashion Indian Style
The impact of Native American art on fashion is discernible in drawings and garments that survive in illustrations in Crawford’s articles, especially in Women’s Wear, and installation photographs from museums, galleries and department stores along with the evidence of exhibition catalogs and the fashion press.¹³ Even a sampling provides a sense of how American Indian traditions were incorporated. A starting point is Crawford’s 1918 article mentioned above. It examines the results of a three-year campaign conducted by Women’s Wear in league with the American Museum of Natural History in order to improve textile and garment design.¹⁴ Representing “…the first fruits of what I may term `creative research’ by the American costume industry,” the article contains four designs associated with Native American traditions, namely a silk fabric inspired by pottery from the “American Southwest” (Edward L. Mayer); a sport coat with embroidery based on “primitive” basketry (A. Beller) (Figure 1); and under the caption “Designs suggested by Indian Documents” :

At the left a dinner gown, or negligee, embroidered in wool. The method of connecting the ends of the belt was suggested by girdles from the Goajiro Indians in the museum’s collections from northern Columbia, and the decoration was inspired by a study of North American Indian collections (Bonwit Teller).

At the right. A black satin evening gown with silken and bead tassels. The idea of the tassels owes its origin to the buckskin thongs that hang from a Dakota Indian costume (Edward L. Mayer).

A milestone in this history involves thirtyfour displays of dress and accessories shown in the "Exhibition of Industrial Art in Textiles and Costumes" at The American Museum of Natural History in November, 1919. The catalog together with an article in the Museum Journal entitled, “Creating a National Art”, written by Herbert J. Spinden, Assistant Curator, Department of Anthropology, indicates the goal of achieving a modern American design through the global collections housed in the museum.¹⁵ Held in the “North American Indian Hall”, the exhibition included gowns in style and trim inspired by designs from Guatemala by J. Wise & Co., and from the Plains by Harry Collins (Figures 2). Two blouses by B.C. Faulkner suggest the patterns and styles associated with the Northwest Coast and Plains Indians shirts. David Aaron & Co., a manufacturer of embroidery, drew on a variety of sources such as Pueblan in an effort to demonstrate the use of art from around the globe “in modern machine-made embroidery” (Figure 3). Similarly The American Bead Company borrowed from Woodlands traditions in order to produce “Modern uses of Beads in Dress Accessories”.

Fig 3: The Brooklyn Standard Union, November 10, 1919.

Overall the Native American influence derives from baskets, pottery and textiles associated with the northern hemisphere (Northwest Coast, Southwest and Woodlands cultures). As for garments shirts prove to be the most significant in keeping with designs from both continents. From these, color, patterns, motifs and materials were adapted in the designing of trim and ornamentation for staples like dresses, suits, coats, blouses and lingerie, and for dress fabrics and accessories. There is a constant dialogue with the prevailing Parisian line, but also departures that would be more extensive if more were extant. It is surprising how closely the dresses by Harry Collins resemble the original Plains Indian garment (Figure 4). Crawford’s 1918 article describes something similar in an “...automobile wrap in pongee silk, practically an exact copy of a Korean grass linen garment."¹⁶ A 1926 article in the bulletin of The Metropolitan Museum of Art states:

Thus we know of the costume designer who spent her time at the Museum seated alone in a gallery of Near Eastern art. She made no notes, she went to no other galleries, she simply ‘exposed’ herself to the influence of graceful line and gentle color, knowing her own receptivity to such effects. The result was a whole series of models recalling in form nothing she had seen at the Museum, yet subtly registering in color key and in certain treatments of line the effect of the ‘exposure.’¹⁷

Fig 4: David Aaron & Co. installation at 1919 exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History showing museum and modern designs. Herbert J. Spinden, “Creating a National Art,” The American Museum Journal 19, no.6, Dec. 1919.

The fashion press reveals that the museum’s impact on blouses was not limited to the designing of trim and ornamentation, but dictated the line of silhouettes, hems, necks and sleeves. Because it was then crucial to a woman’s wardrobe, the history of the blouse is doubly important in the Americanization of fashion. In fall, 1919 Women’s Wear galleries showcased “blouses” from around the world donated by the American Museum of Natural History and the Brooklyn Museum in which Native American examples were prominent.¹⁸ The exhibition generated a lot of attention in the trade. Within weeks Women’s Wear depicted garments that grew out of it, including a blouse “fashioned after a garment of the Plains Indians made of elk skin and brilliantly trimmed with quill work.”¹⁹ The excitement sparked a buyer and designer for Abraham and Strauss department store in Brooklyn to develop a line of blouses, which were advertised in local newspapers and prominently mounted in a window along with the originals: one depended on the culture of the Plains and another on the Huichol Indians of Northern Mexico.²⁰ These adaptations show how closely the original garments were followed (Figure 5).

In the end it is easy to call the search for an American fashion a success from the standpoint of the New York museum group in the terms it set for itself, at least partially. The intention was to utilize the country’s potential in materials, manufacturing and design for which an abundance of evidence survives in the fashion and museum press. In retrospect the adoption of nonwestern art was not new in fashion, but traceable to France prior to the war.²¹ However, as developed in New York beginning in 1917, this tendency was rooted in this country with a mindset directed toward local museums and based at times on indigenous sources.

Research needs to be done in order to determine how other garment areas such as Cleveland and Chicago responded to the institutional support of museums and to New York as a style center. As of now costume historians who judge the Americanness of the 1910s and 1920s focus on style and a handful of figures in the thriving garment center of New York City.²² Histories are waiting to be told elsewhere that promise to yield a variety in American fashion under the direction of museums. The Sears catalog, for example, sold blouses reminiscent of Plains Indians shirts and bathrobes inspired by Pueblan textiles to women across the country from 1918 through the 1920s.²³

Fig 5: Model with J. Wise and Co. and original design of the Huipil from Guatemala in connection with 1919 exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History. Herbert J. Spinden, “Creating a National Art,” The American Museum Journal 19, no.6, Dec. 1919.

Unfortunately the very nature of utilizing museum collections carries with it the danger of designing costume, a fault of some of the era’s better fashions.²⁴ The recycling of history, a commonplace of fashion, walks a narrow line between the poles of “dress up” and “dressed up” and perhaps it is for the best that these American fashions incline more toward fabric, trim and color than overall design in the elaboration of styles from the past.

Dressing Up Indian
What strikes me about the fashionable wearing of Native American styles is the concurrent practice of dressing up as Indians in order to cultivate an American womanhood. In Playing Indian Philip J. Deloria maps a history of Euro-American men donning feathers, blankets and face paint in activities hinged upon finding a national self.²⁵ While persisting from colonists who threw tea into Boston harbor, to nineteenth-century aspiring national poets and Woodcraft Indians to the men’s movement, more recently, it wasn’t until the early 20th century that playing Indian became solidly entrenched among women and when it did it was in terms of the Campfire Girls. Stemming from the late 19th century this organization took hold in the 1910s, borrowing from Ernest Thompson Seton’s Woodcraft Indians, which stressed Indianness as a key part of American manhood. With values rooted in nature and physical work Seton sought to bolster masculinity in city boys feminized by industrialization. Campfire Girls, under the guidance of Luther and Charlotte Gulick, aimed at shaping ideals of American femininity in linkage with Native American women and their tie with nature, motherhood and domesticity. As a way to emphasize this affinity, the membership made and wore clothes in imitation of their models. Deloria puts the incorporation of women into the tradition of playing Indian into a larger picture entwined with national identity in line with “…modernity, which has used Indian play to encounter the authentic amidst the anxiety of urban industrial and postindustrial life.”²⁶

Although recognized as American and invoked to prove the existence of a national style, self definition through American Indians did not belong in the main to the fashion world’s program. Things Native American were not singled out in the museum collections and thus cannot be counted as part of an identity quest via indigenous peoples. The latter then preoccupied many white Americans, especially after the war, coupled with a novel appreciation for American Indian culture, which is where fashion enters the picture.²⁷ Even though in general the fashion discourse is stereotypical and ethnocentric, it expresses genuine interest in the aesthetic value contained in Native American cultural forms, and recognizes therein art rather than ethnography in step with the new thinking. Just compare “Primitive American art collection” and “Made in slate gray Georgette crepe, the wide bands incorporate all the exquisite color sense of men who looked to Nature for all their colorings.”

Rather than an antidote to industrial angst, the adoption of Native American forms can be linked to a celebration of machine technology and to the related question of Americanness, a situation addressed in 1919 by Crawford:

The exhibit in the Mallinson booth is in every detail essentially American. The silks have been woven and printed in the eight Mallinson mills in America, the designs have been created right here in America, and in many instances were inspired by American sources. In practically all instances, the designers, themselves American, have studied, dreamed and originated in American atmosphere.²⁸

The stress on technology and Americanness in design in general is understandable as a way to offset the economic crisis brought about by the war and to bolster industry, which had a positive influence in advancing the profession of designer, even as it outdistanced handicrafts and created problems for labor.²⁹ The striving in fashion to make something distinctly American produced in number offered a needed alternative to the stratified world that the Parisian couture represented, despite the fact that differences in cost and status remained. But the mark was missed in not paying more attention to the conditions of the users and not following through to the fullest, when in the mid 1920s eyes turned again toward Paris.

What about the women outside of the Campfire Girls who knowingly wore fashionable items indebted to Native American culture? Is this an attempt to identify with Indians as Americans, a phase in the construction of American femininity, a stance against Paris, or a fashion expression? Are the four mutually exclusive? I will follow the lead of Deloria in recognizing a paradoxical relationship concerning national identity, American Indians and fashion design to end with the mental image of white girls at play dressed up like “Indian braves”.³⁰