Nufashond

I have to admit it took a while to catch on to how this is meant to be pronounced. It sure seemed it would sound like Yiddish, as would easily befit a garment-related product. What also threw me: the item was for finishing fashion no longer nu—

Impressive quality, from back whenever this was produced.

I don't know what this was called, or whether it's in the list of pleasing products ("edgetrim"?)

In any case, the trim is a crocheted effect done in cotton thread.

Be sure to send in your 10¢—

It would be interesting to find a copy. I'm guessing 1920s for the bag style.

I do see a full page Nufashond ad in a 1921 volume of a trade journal, Dry Goods Economist. The ad cites the "Knot Work" and other instruction books, along with touting such products as corset lacer ("the tip will not come off, neither will it rust nor tear the dainty undervest, for it's the Nufashond self-color fabric tip)"; "Shoulder Strapping... simple in design and attractive when seen through the transparent blouse"; "shoe lacers... in that self-color fabric tip which you can tuck into your shoe top without endangering your fine hose." An effective convenience? It's hard to see how women had time for things other than lacing up shoes.

It's a shame not to have examples of the knot work. Rick rack projects seem to have been big, with instructions available for the same price. Evidently, there was an ongoing series, and scans of two volumes are generously provided here (from 1916) and here (1933).

Interesting, odd stuff, considering that I never would have imagined using rick rack as a basis for lace projects. True, I can't imagine ever wanting to do any kind of lace project, myself, but they may well appeal to others. And as is the case with any fashion: wait long enough and what's old could again be Nu.

Eventually Your Ribbon House (Tales From the Schmatta Trade, 2)

Sample folder; front—

Dial MUrray Hill 4-4322, and, Eventually...

Reverse—

Merchandise inside—

Opened; 7x14 inches

Left side of triptych: two thin layers of fabric ("self material") are sewn together for straps—

The other straps use machine-made ribbon ("standard qualities")—

Stock shades: white, pink, tearose

The company's one-time headquarters, 102 Madison Avenue at 29th St—

Photo: 14 to 42  (2003)

This is from New York City Signs – 14th To 42nd Street. Among the site's details on 102 Madison Avenue at 29th Street—

The Ribbon Mills Corp. dates from 1924. They were located at 1180 Broadway (Arthur Flatto, president-treasurer) until 1933, then moved to 102 Madison Ave. They remained at this address until 1939. Click here for Ribbon Mills sign. Ribbon Mills Corp. was preceded by the Flatto Ribbon Corp., founded by the brothers George I. Flatto (1886-1969) and Arthur C. Flatto (1895-1955) in 1919. They were sons of Samuel A. Flatto, a pawnbroker, who immigrated from Germany ca. 1867-70. The family appears in the U. S. Census of 1900 living at 170 E. 95th St. George is 13 years old and Arthur C. Flatto is 5. Prior to founding Flatto Ribbon Mills in 1919 George Flatto had previously been employed for 17 years at E. H. Levy. Another brother, William Flatto (1885-1965), was also associated with the business. He was elected a director of Flatto Ribbon Corp. in 1953. Ribbon Mills and Flatto were both located at 29-33 W. 35th St. in 1940/41 (with prominent signs) when the "tax photos" (available at the NYC Municipal Archives) were taken. The Ribbon Mills Corp. closed in the early 1950s and Flatto Ribbon continued until around 1959.

Site note: "Construction of new residential housing along 29th St. has almost totally destroyed the view of these signs as of mid-year 2007."

Among other long-ago building occupants was Max Held Waist Co./Forsythe Waist (previously, Max Held "Herald Square Waist Makers"). Fels Dresses was founded in the 1880s, and in 1901-02 was listed as manufacturing suits and children's clothes. 14 to 42 posts this 1920 New York Times ad—

1926 ad; different address, same old slogan...

And as for that Ribbon Mills slogan...

Sooner or later: You'll buy.

The mildly threatening line seems a peculiarly New York locution of yore. Though the ribbon folder is a fascinating bit of commercial history, the slogan can't help but make me think of an elderly, spectacularly hideous New Yorker of our own time.

If only we could send him and his locution ("You're going to love me! Believe me!"), back to the day of ribbon houses.

Tales From the Schmatta Trade (1)

As told on thrift shop sale day...

Marcus & Wiesen, Inc      Made in U.S.A.

(from pinterest: a product of somewhat newer vintage)

The Vanity Fair brand still exists—as VF, which includes more recently purchased brands (Lee, Timberland). As company history would suggest, the organization went from specializing in ladies' unmentionables to encompassing what might be the other end of spectrum—products meant to convey an image of the rugged outdoors. By now, however, all the stuff likely comes from the same set of Chinese factories.

Marcus & Wiesen, Inc., is not mentioned in that history page, and was probably a sub-contractor for Vanity Fair.

The name does appear in Chain Store Age, Volume 17 (1941). In the section, Directory of Manufacturers (page 42, under "Garters, Ladies' & Children's"), Marcus & Wiesen is listed at 26th E. 14th St., New York.

Emilio Guerra

An extensive and interesting history of 22-26 East 14th Street is found in the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission's 2008 report (pdf). The building began as Baumann Brothers Furniture and Carpet Store, built 1880-1881.

One of the more prominent, prolific, and versatile New York firms in the late-nineteenth century, D. & J. Jardine executed designs for a wide variety of building types, including a number of notable cast-iron fronts, in contemporary styles. The wide cast-iron front facade of the Baumann Brothers store, manufactured by the West Side Architectural Iron Works, is one of the Jardines' and one of the city's most inventive, unusual, and ornamental. Built toward the end of the heyday of cast-iron fronts in New York and the flourishing creativity in that material, the Baumann Brothers store is also a signal achievement of Aesthetic Movement design.

In 1884 Baumann Brothers occupied the entire building and advertised as, "the largest and most complete furnishing establishment in America." During the twentieth century—

For eight decades, the ground story contained 5-10-and-25-cent stores, beginning with the fourth Woolworth store in Manhattan (1900-28), acclaimed at its opening as "the largest ten-cent store in the world" and in 1910 the location of the chain's first lunchroom. This space was later a store for F. & W. Grand, H.L. Green, and McCrory. The upper stories were leased for over eight decades for show rooms and manufacturing by various firms related to the textile and sporting goods industries. This was the location of Rubens & Meyer, hosiery (1901-14); [Lewis Mark] Hornthal, [Joseph J.] Benjamin & [Simon R.] Riem, wholesale clothing manufacturers (c. 1902-23); Sohn, Oppenheimer & Co., fine trousers (1913-29); [Alex] Marcus & [Alex] Wiesner (later Wiesen), elastic specialties, garters, and girdles (1930-85)...

Following ownership changes over the years, the lot was transferred

... in 1967 to the Marcus & Wiesen Realty Corp., whose principals were the long-term garter-making tenants in the building. The southern portion of the lot and the building were conveyed in 1902 to the James McCreery Realty Corp., which retained ownership until 1965, when they were acquired by the Marcus & Wiesen Realty Corp. The entire property was sold to Irving and Elliott Sutton in 1979. The building became a condominium in 1999. The upper stories (Lot 1101), acquired at that time by the New School University, are currently in use as an annex to the Parsons School of Design, while the ground story contains a drugstore and several small shops.

Along the way, the "garter-making tenants" were involved in some legal drama, according to the 1940 Federal Supplement: Cases Argued and Determined in the District Courts of the United States and the Court of Claims, with Key Number Annotations, Volume 30 (Page xxix). The case in District Court of NY.: Marcus & Wiesen v. Universal Brassiere & Just-Rite Corset Co.

At some point the company relocated from such valuable real estate as its original home, but continued in its industry for an undetermined period of time. The last reference I find is from 1995, per a note in this book, Unions and Workplace Reorganization (edited by Bruce Nissen).

A note that's sadly quaint in itself; just imagine, companies deigning to talk with unions. And, it turns out, 1995 was when the storied ILGWU last existed under that name.

Under the Blue, White and Red

In a jumbled pile of thrift shop scarves J. spotted this bit of history—

Rayon scarf, app. 69 cm by 71 cm (27 by 28 ")

During World War II, clothing manufacturers used rayon to replace unavailable silk. Although the European war didn't end until May 8, 1945 (VE Day), this scarf might have been made any time after the August 25, 1944 liberation of Paris it commemorates.

Photo: Robert Capa

This month happens to mark the 70th anniversary. The distance is evident in France's political swings to the right, and in the latter's usual efforts at re-writing history.

But this scarf represents an historic moment in Paris, 1944.

From Sacré-Coeur at the city's highest point—

The steps of Montmartre sweep down to a city full of flags, banners, and jubilant cartoon characters.

The whole scene surrounded by victory slogans—

"Vive Les Sammies"—

This was a new one on me, and I didn't get it. But (as usual) J. did: "Sammies" for "Uncle Sam." This appears to date from World War I, when it was used by both French and British soldiers.

There doesn't seem much to be found (even in French) on designer Denise Louvet.

But the textile house was well-known. Its trademark, the Place Vendôme Column, denoted the shop's Paris location.

Some period ads are here. This is the shop in 1937—

The patriotic color schemes of these ads are from 1945—

By an interesting coincidence, J. found this scarf just after I had read Wearing Propaganda: Textiles on the Home Front in Japan, Britain, and the United States. The book was published in conjunction with this exhibit, curated by author Jacqueline Atkins.

It was fascinating to see how the French scarf continues the British and American war-time theme of morale-boosting messages printed on textiles. The chapter in Atkins' book devoted to English scarves, "London Squares," is written by graphic design collector and historian Paul Rennie. Rennie has a pdf of the material posted here. Illustrations are unfortunately small and low resolution, but Rennie's text offers some interesting social history of wartime Britain as background to propaganda scarf manufacture.

With their increased wartime presence in factories, women were admonished to cover their hair for safety—

Poster: F. Kenwood Giles, 1941
Imperial War Museum

Rennie writes that—

The scarf became, in the context of war work, an important element in safety awareness and part of the proper uniform of the female industrial workforce. These fashion notes were further emphasised through a discourse of make-do-and-mend and also in the pages of the fashion press. The pages of "Vogue" championed the active participation of women in the war effort and ran features on work wear and propaganda textiles.

(Some material on British Vogue's work at the behest of the government is here.)

Two English design houses of note, Jacqmar and Ascher, produced "up-market" scarves. Rennie offers some fascinating social background—

The designs produced by Jacqmar are unashamedly aimed at an economy of exchange between wartime sweethearts in London. The existence of designs aimed at American personnel, the Free French and Poles in London serve as a reminder that, whatever the official line, fraternisation between these different groups was popular. The existence of these textiles is evidence of a social transformation in London during WW2. The pursuit of an export market as a national priority during and after the war placed a premium of these products at home. The company office in Mayfair identified the products and brand as high class, as did the relatively expensive price point of the products.

(A friendship scarf example from the Imperial War Museum, along with other collection links, is here.)

Jacqmar's graphic style was one of

... dynamic and expressive line drawing. The inexact registration of colour blocks over the line give a pleasing looseness to the design and hint at "cubist" influences.

This short piece includes a nice slide show of Jacqmar samples from another collector. Even when scarf designs featured such text as war-time slogans, Jacqmar's style was particularly jaunty. This one was manufactured after the US had joined the war—

"Jacqmar Presents" featured catch phrases of BBC radio programs—

This collector suggests that, at war office request, Jacqmar did subtle pro-French propaganda with this—

It's hard to beat those colorful, clever peintures. Still, J's scarf was an amazing find, with an historic moment expressed in period graphic style.

The perfect souvenir for a Sammie in post-war France to bring home.

Oriental Rugs, A. U. Dilley & Co.

Spotted at my regular haunt, the weekly library sale's 25¢ pamplet bin—a clothbound book with gilt cover design of a rug, complete with fringe.

Publication details inside were "1909, The Tudor Press, Boston"—so I was surprised this hadn't been caught and marked as a "collectible."

But even before spotting the date, I was amazed to see an end paper with the original owner's bookplate—

Yes, the name is this fellow's—

The book seems to have been a giveaway to customers of the "Oriental Rug Adviser"—

The text is quite informative, with photos and examples devoted to designs and weaving techniques of many different regions and ethnic groups.

It made sense that Stickley would acquire this for his library, as it seemed an authoritative guide to the subject. Despite the connection to a shop, this is no direct sales pitch; instead, the text is full of points on how to identify rug types and quality—including how to spot deceptive practices. The author writes in detail about methods of "aging" new carpets passed off as antiques, as well as other ways of selling poor quality merchandise to the unwary.

Searching the author's name, I learned that Arthur Urbane Dilley was not only a rug dealer, but also a noted authority on the subject. He later wrote full-fledged tomes; the 1909 book is eighty-one pages, and a complete scan is available here.

I was getting the picture of a gentleman-scholar type, and soon found that Dilley had founded an organization full of them: the Hajji Baba Club. Named for the hero of a nineteenth century novel, the club is a world all its own.

From the club site's history:

...The club was formed in 1932, and early meetings were held in an apartment designed to recreate the setting from where the rugs came: Sheridan Square as Turkman yurt, and the home of Arthur Arwine, engineer. The other founding members were Roy Winton and Arthur Gale, both involved in aspects of the film industry, Anton Lau, another engineer, and Arthur Dilley, the scholar and dealer whose interest was his full-time job. Soon to join the rapidly expanding club were engineer Joseph McMullan, who amassed perhaps the most impressive collection of the group, and Maurice Dimand, curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Those 1930s "Hajjis" and their Sheridan Square yurts may be rather quaint. But the club is still around and has done some nice museum exhibits; links to information and virtual tours here.

The club site's biography of "the first Hajji" describes Dilley's education at Harvard—where he lived in a residence room once occupied by Henry David Thoreau, a coincidence that fueled Dilley's ambition to become a great writer. Later drawn to studying antique Oriental rugs, Dilley developed a fascination that led to his career as rug dealer and scholar. Or make that, a scholar who was content to sell a rug as long as he could first educate the buyer to sufficiently appreciate it.

The bio also explains why my copy of the book has the original (Boston) address papered over, and a correction stamped in—

Dilley had set up shop in Boston, where in 1914 a devoted customer persuaded (and financed) him in moving the business to New York.

That patron also launched Dilley as a lecturer at museums, women's clubs, and other cultural venues. Before long—

Having firmly established himself in New York and having written dozens of lectures on a whole range of carpet-related topics, Dilley began to consider a major work on the subject. During the 1920s, rugs were a hot topic and, given the commercial success that Charles Scribner’s Sons had enjoyed with [John Kimberly] Mumford's Oriental Rugs – an immediate triumph in 1900 and by the 1920s in its fourth printing – Dilley had good reason to believe he could sell them the idea of offering another book on the same subject. He signed a contract with the publisher while both the United States economy and interest in rugs were dashing along at top speed, but unfortunately the Great Depression arrived before his book appeared, which meant that it, unlike Mumford's work, tended to sit on bookstore shelves.

But poor sales – only a thousand copies during its first two years in print – failed to dampen Dilley’s enthusiasm for his work. He thought of it as a literary achievement, not as a commercial commodity, and when, a few years later, he discovered a Houghton Mifflin textbook that included an excerpt from his book as a model of well-executed prose alongside examples from the likes of Charles Dickens, William Thackeray and Charles Lamb, Dilley considered his efforts validated, his book a triumph, the finest feather in his cap, one he would never exchange for a place on a list of best-sellers.

Nagoya, 1945: Survival - Gratitude - Creation

I've posted some images and thoughts on Japan's current disasters, both natural and man-made.

As I've also noted, the staggering task before Japan is complicated by years of economic prosperity. Even aside from the technological disaster of how to contain deadly nuclear reactors, the earthquake and tsunami left a region of the country buried under the everyday toxic materials of consumer society.

The big picture starts to make the country's task of rebuilding after World War II seem easy, in comparison: as if it had been mainly a matter of clearing rubble to make a clean start.

And despite the post-war scarcity of food and necessities, much of a war-weary populace looked forward to a freer life in a more democratic environment.

These thoughts of "then" versus "now"—and of the survivors whose lives were so terribly disrupted this March—also got me thinking about Ayako Miyawaki.

I didn't know her name at the time, but I started to see her designs when I lived in western Japan.

First, was this poster for a 1984 exhibition of appliqué works—
Unfortunately, I only saw the poster, not the show. But I was struck by the lively textile use in this design.

Then I began to notice fabric products printed with appliqué designs by the same artist. These were natural forms like fruit and vegetables, all fashioned from colorful textiles and signed with the syllable あ ["Ah".]

Catalog of a 1991 exhibit at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, in D.C.

Beautifully printed in Japan, this detailed look at the work is next-best to actually seeing it. (All images below are from the book.)

This is how I finally learned the artist's name, and something of her story: told in the catalog's biographical sketch, critical notes, and Ayako's own words.

Born in 1905, she married Haru Miyawaki, a painter who taught public school in Nagoya, where the couple lived with their three children.

Ayako was forty when the war ended. On that day—August 15, 1945—

...when tears streamed ceaselessly down my cheeks, I realized now that I would be free to use time I had so long spent in vain going in and out of the bomb shelter on many hard and unbearable days during wartime.

I was happy that the war was over and excited about my own free time, which I yearned to have and which had been long in coming. It was then that I thought I should begin to do something for myself. "Appliqué work" was the first thing that came to my mind.

It was a craft already popular in Japan, but generally done from printed patterns. Taking the old clothes and rags that were available to her, Ayako went to work on her own designs, based on observing natural forms.

When I completed my first work, I gave it a close and joyful embrace! I decided to produce one work a day and exhibited them on the wall of my room. Sometimes I asked my husband to comment on my creations, and sometimes my children would review my work as if they were full-fledged art critics. Those were happy days.

Beginning from that sense of gratitude at the opportunity to start over, joined to her creativity in observation and design, Ayako developed her work over the years.

The designs use a variety of fabrics, often Japanese prints, batiks, and kasuri.

The latter is a technique akin to ikat, with designs traditionally woven in white on an indigo background. An illustrated pdf on kasuri/ikat technique and design is here. Some colorful mass-produced kasuri of the 1950s—and even more colorful labels from the fabric bolts—are here.

Ayako makes ingenious use of printed fabrics and kasuri to form details:

Flatfish and Camellia, 1973

Chinese Cabbage, 1975

Swellfish, 1986

Various fibers also contribute detail:

Onion Cut in Two, 1965

Potential materials are all around us, and in the mid-1980s, Ayako did a number of designs from used coffee filter cloth.

Haniwa Clay Figure of a Dog, 1985

Haniwa Clay Figures of a Man and Woman Dancing, 1985

Oh, It's My Grandpa! 1985

As a textile lover, I find Ayako's work very pleasing in design and choice of materials. This noren curtain is especially charming, as she comments directly on both materials and forms.

Good Forms and Fine Textiles, 1986

A closeup of one bit of a panel shows the beauty of the fabric details contained in each gourd shape:
Ayako began exhibiting work to the public in the 1950s.

... In those days I was full of love for pieces of fabric, nature and natural objects, and full of the joy of creation. As time went on, when I felt aged, I realized how much I was mentally supported by creating my works—I became strong by having a solid purpose in life.

Over the years she received greater recognition, and a mid-1980s exhibit traveled to several Japanese cities.

After her husband's death in 1985—

... I was not myself for some time. But when I was told I could set his soul at rest by continuing my work, I started in again, bit by bit. I always think that my husband's soul is still with me. Whenever happy and delightful things happen to me, I feel his soul keeping guard over me.

In 1988 the Asahi Shimbun, a major national newspaper, arranged for a show to tour Japan, then go on display in D.C.

... When I first heard of this [American exhibit], I was near to tears with joy. I think my husband would be the second person to be glad of this news, if he were here. I can hear his voice saying, "good for you." I wish to express my heartfelt gratitude, as well as that of my late husband. Now I feel as happy as when I created my first works. Involuntarily, I am clasping my hands in prayer.