| This dissertation explores design and manufacturing in America through the lens of the industrial arts. It concentrates on fashion design in New York City during the formative years of the fashion design profession and women's ready-to-wear industry from 1894 to 1940. For modern design historians industrial manufacturing and conception versus making are crucial to definitions of design, and significant within this context is "industrial design", a term that arose in the late 1920s and is tied to machines, advances in mass production and design creativity.; By investigating the institutions, theories of mass production, and vocational and marketing practices associated with fashion design, the dissertation argues that the present understanding that frames design in terms of manufacturing and conception is historically incomplete and thoroughly tied to ideologies of technology and gender. During a period of accelerated mechanization from the 1850s to 1940, the term "industrial art" gained currency to describe useful objects that were made by hand, machines or a combination of the two, and fashion design was important therein. This terminology and the related phrase, "art and industry", designated the process of bringing "good" design to bear on mass produced items, as undertaken in educational programs, museums, and societies of manufacturers and designers.; Through a study of the museums (The American Museum of Natural History, Brooklyn Museum and Metropolitan Museum of Art), schools (Cooper Union, Pratt Institute and Parsons School of Design), societies (The Fashion Group) and ideas (Elizabeth Hawes) that propelled garment making from the realm of dressmaking with its connotations of handiwork and domesticity to a practice of design, this study enables a more complete understanding of this period of design and industrial history, and offers the opportunity to consider the shifting meanings and values assigned to the concepts of "design" and "designer" in American scholarship. The dissertation also reveals attitudes about machines, technology, and modernism, as well as the social roles of women and men, underlying the cleavage between the design and industrial arts and definitions of design in America that persist to this day. |
