"Eric" et sa femme

Carl Erickson (1891-1958) was Vogue magazine's ace fashion illustrator in Paris from about 1925 to 1940 and continued his career at the American edition until his death. His wife, Lee Creelman Erickson also illustrated for the French Vogue and during the early-to-mid 1920s was more prominent than her husband.

Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find biographical information on Lee. But Eric (as he was called and soon used as his signature) is better documented. For starters, you might link here and here.

Lee's style was comparatively solid and literal, whereas Eric soon blossomed into his characteristic sketchy style. Underlying that sketchy style was a solid grasp of the forms he was interpreting. For that reason, I respect him even though the sketchiness usually was too extreme for my taste.

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First some images of Lee's work. This illustration is from 1925.

A 1926 illustration. Here and in the image above she signs her full married name.

Finally, an illustration from about 1933. At this point she signs using her married initials in a form similar to that of Eric (see below).

Photo of Eric at work. The bowler hat was habitual attire.

Illustration from around 1925. Here he signs his full name.

By 1929 he was using "Eric."  The style here is similar to that of his wife, but freer sketching is on the way.

I'm guessing that was made around 1931. I include it because it shows a car being loaded on a passenger ship. My impression is that fashion illustrators and others who are good at depicting people often do poorly when cars are shown. But here Eric gets the form and perspective correctly even though the car is simply indicated, not rendered. This tells me that he really knew his stuff.

A 1938 illustration showing Eric's mature style.

This was probably done in 1939 after World War 2 started, but before France was defeated. It's a railroad coach scene where the subject might be the woman's attire. Next to her is a French Army lieutenant.

A 1943 illustration made when the Ericksons were in America. Less sketchy than his usual wash illustrations, this is an excellent line drawing.

Another 1943 work, also excellent.  To my embarrassment, I do not recognize the subject of this portrait and cannot find that information on the Web: please comment if you know.

Distressing Jeans

I find it interesting that many things tend to drift to extremes over time. Often enough, they seem to follow the pattern described by Crane Brinton in his 1938 classic study "Anatomy of Revolution." It's about politics. At some point conditions are very bad, but begin to improve. That's where reform movements kick in -- not when matters are at their worst. But the reform movements drift into radicalism because moderate reformers become regarded as not being pure enough in their beliefs and are purged. This is encapsulated by the phrase "No enemies to the Left." Eventually the movements drift to such an extreme that a successful reaction sets in.

This is not the exclusive case of politics and bloody revolutions and reactions. One far milder form is found in the world of clothing fashion. Here, a designer or clothing brand (or a designer working for a clothing maker) comes up with an idea about something that hasn't quite been done before. The company makes some items having the new style and the items sell well. So a competitor soon markets a similar, but slightly more extreme design with the intent of exploiting what is becoming a fashion fad. Then other firms jump in, adding more exaggeration and the initial firm joins the process. Soon it's a free-for-all where a number of rag trade outfits are offering a spectrum of such styles, many items pushing the limits of practicality. Reaction sets in when consumers get bored with the style and move on to a new fashion attraction. The only blood here is the red ink on balance sheets caused by large stocks of garments unsold when the market for them collapsed.

I've been noticing for quite a while a number of young women wearing tattered jeans. But now (I'm drafting this post early December 2017) the weather was getting quite cool, and I'm still seeing a lot of bare leg peeking out behind all those tatters. This post was triggered when I walked past the display window of my local American Eagle Outfitters store and saw some seriously "distressed" women's jeans on display. How much more distressing is possible, I wondered. Not much, I concluded.

Some background. Half a century ago, young men bought blue jeans from Levi's, Wrangler's and other brands. They were stiff and uniformly dyed. After a year or so of steady wear, the fabric would soften and the color faded, often most strongly in areas with heavy wear such as the knees and thighs. Eventually cuffs might become frayed and fabric might begin to wear through at the knees. This kind of wear-and-tear became something of a status thing. Some wearers of well-used jeans began to look down on folks wearing those stiff, new jeans. Clothing companies eventually caught on to this and marketed factory-faded garments. In recent years outfits such as Ralph Lauren were selling men's jeans that were not only pre-faded, but had factory-made fraying here and there.

This trend led to mass-produced worn-through knee areas on pant legs. And beyond, though mostly for women's jeans. Examples from American Eagle's website are shown below.

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Let's begin with jeans having a touch of factory fading.

Moving on, here are worn-through knees.

More faux- wear 'n' tear: frayed cuffs and holes on the thighs for some obscure reason -- not a place for normal wearing-out.

Now we must be getting close to the extreme. Much more of this trend and there won't be much of a garment left -- the fashion circling back to gal's cut-off jeans.

Porter Woodruff, Neglected Vogue Illustrator

Porter Woodruff (1894-1959) was one of five American fashion illustrators Vogue magazine had based in Paris in the early 1920s. He continued illustrating for Vogue through the 1930s, residing in New York City and Tunisia as well as Paris. He died in Tunisia. Why little else is known about him can be gleaned here (click on the "learn more ..." line).

Besides Vogue, he contributed covers to House & Garden magazine (another Condé Nast publication) around the time of the Great War, before moving to Paris. He also painted North African scenes that fail to impress me. You can Google on his name to locate some of these if you are curious.

Woodruff was not a great fashion illustrator, but was good in the context of his times.

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House & Garden cover - June 1917
A nice composition in synch with the architectural style.

House & Garden cover - November 1917

Sketch of Chanel costume - 1923

Vogue cover - March 1926
Interesting minimalist concept.

Wedding dress by Jean Patou - 1926

Fashion illustration - 1926

Vogue cover art - January 1928
Woodruff's best-known work.

Pen & wash illustration - Vogue - May 1929

Franklin Simon hat - Vogue - December 1931
By the 1930s, Deco geometry was out and flowing lines were in.

Dorothy Hood, Fashion Illustrator

This is probably the least-informative post I've ever done. That's because I can't seem to find anything on the Internet or in my reference material in the way of a biography of Dorothy Hood (1918-1984).

That strikes me as rather strange because she was the ace fashion illustrator for the famous Lord & Taylor store in New York in the 1950s and 1960s.

A couple of years ago I wrote about Irwin Caplan, a well-known cartoonist who taught fashion art back when I was in art school. Caplan regularly brought a copy of the Sunday edition of The New York Times to the classroom so that we could paw through it and see what the top fashion illustrators were doing. Since Lord & Taylor advertised heavily in the Sunday Times, we got to see a lot of Hood's work.

Somewhere I read that at one point Hood damaged her drawing hand and had to learn to draw with the other one. But I can't seem to locate that source either, so take it as hearsay.

All I can do for now is show some examples of her work. Fashion art (and photography) have changed since her time, not necessarily for the better.

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From 1954

From 1958

From 1958

From 1964

From 1964

From 1964

From 1965

From 1964

Dorothy Hood's 1950s, 1960s Fashion Illustration

My training in commercial art included a course in fashion illustration. The instructor, Irwin Caplan, who I wrote about here, would bring issues of the Sunday New York Times to class for our inspection and inspiration.

The Times in those days was filled with advertisements for department and women's apparel stores. Around 1960 those included Macy's, B. Altman, Arnold Constable and Bergdorf Goodman. Perhaps the ads Caplan touted the most were from Lord & Taylor, featuring the illustrations of Dorothy Hood (1902-1970). Not surprising, because Hood had been at the top of the New York fashion illustration world for a long time and was still going strong.

There seems to be little about Hood on the Internet, but some biographical information can be found here and here. The latter source mentions that due to a 1950s accident affecting her right arm, she trained herself to illustrate using her left hand ... without noticeably affecting the results.

Most fashion illustrations in newspapers and even magazines in the 1950s and 60s were printed in black and white; run-of-paper color is common now, but rare then. Illustrators usually opted for brushwork and ink or watercolor washes to quickly produce effective views of featured merchandise.

Here are some examples of Hood's work for Lord & Taylor from those days.

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Ted Rand: Local Illustrator Who Made Good

Eons ago, when I was majoring in commercial art at the University of Washington, the Big Man in the Seattle illustration scene was Ted Rand (1915-2005).

There were other competent illustrators working in Seattle back in the days when the Seattle area was far from the world-class place it is now. The same can probably be accurately said for many mid-size metropolitan areas back when the nationally-known illustrators worked out of the New York City area (mostly), Chicago (to a lesser extent) and San Francisco (somewhat). Today's example features Seattle, because that's the place I knew about at the time.

Rand was the top illustrator locally in part because his work was featured in Pendleton ads that appeared in national publications. The other local guy with national cred was cartoonist Irwin Kaplan, who I wrote about here. As I mentioned in that post, Kaplan taught a fashion illustration class, and Rand appeared there once as a guest lecturer. Later on, Rand taught at Washington; too bad I missed out on that.

A biographical note on Rand is here, and a two-page obituary is here. As best I can tell, he had little or no art training beyond high school, so he must have been a "natural." Also noteworthy is that, at around age 65, he shifted professional gears to become a prolific writer and illustrator of children's books.

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The images above look like they might be two segments from a horizontal spread (note the Frederick & Nelson logotype split). Frederick's was the leading Seattle department store into the 1960s.

Rand's work appeared nationwide during the 1950s when he illustrated ads for Portland, Oregon's Pendleton.

Here are two of his book covers.

Men's Suits: Drapery Extremes

Many things seem to swing between extremes. Not all extremes reach absolute limits, but they can come close to something like limits imposed by practicality. That is the case for the subject of this post: the amount of cloth used in men's suits.

It turns out that two extremes were reached about 20 years apart. Around 1940, fad apparel for some young men was in the form of the Zoot Suit, an exaggeration of current men's suit styles that already were rather baggy. By 1960 fashionable men's suits were snug and used minimal material. Lapels were narrow, as were neckties. The archetypical suit had three buttons and the two upper ones were buttoned down. On college campuses, this was sometimes called Ivy style, after the prestigious group of colleges and universities in the Northeastern USA (Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Penn, Columbia, Dartmouth, Brown and Cornell) where the mode of dress was supposedly popular.

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Here is a Zoot Suit. Its characteristics include: Baggy, high waisted trousers "pegged" (narrowed) toward the cuffs. A loose-fitting suit jacket with wide lapels, heavily padded shoulders and a hem down toward knee level. An extremely long key chain was a usual accessory. Neckties might be long or (as in this case) bow, in both instances using plenty of material.

Two Zoot-suiters with a young Army sergeant (who himself might have worn a Zoot Suit a year or two earlier).

The great Cab Calloway in 1942 wearing an exaggerated (yes, it must have been possible) Zoot Suit for a performance.

Now it's 1961 and we find Audrey Hepburn and George Peppard on New York's Park Avenue during the filming of Breakfast at Tiffany's.  Peppard is wearing an Ivy style suit, but for comfort's sake has it unbuttoned.