Elizabeth Hawes (2) (1903–1971)

Elizabeth Hawes was born in Ridgewood, New Jersey. At age 10, she was making clothes and hats for her dolls, before beginning to sew her own clothes. Two years later, she started selling clothes to the young children of her mother's friends.

Like her mother, Elizabeth attended Vassar College, where she majored in economics and participated in college theatricals. In 1924, she got an unpaid apprenticeship in the Bergdorf Goodman workrooms in New York City to learn how expensive clothes were made to order. Before she left to return to college, the French imports came into the store, and she decided to go to France to learn more. After graduating in the spring of 1925, she arrived in Paris and went to work at a shop on the Faubourg Saint-Honoré that made high-quality but illegal copies of haute couture dresses. In 1926, she became a sketcher for a New York manufacturer of mass-produced clothing and a full-time fashion correspondent, writing a regular column that appeared in the New York Post, Detroit Free Press, Baltimore Sun, and other newspapers. This led to a regular column for the New Yorker under the pseudonym "Parisite," which ran for three years. She worked as a fashion buyer for Macy's, and then as a stylist for Lord & Taylor. The rest of her time in Paris was divided between socializing with her wealthy Vassar friends and engaging in the bohemian life; she befriended an artistic crowd that included the sculptors Alexander Calder and Isamo Noguchi. In 1928, she got a job with Nicole Groult, sister of Paul Poiret. There she developed her method of design based upon the technique of draping on a wooden mannequin. She
returned to New York in 1928 and joined up with Rosemary Harden, the cousin of a friend, to open a shop called Hawes-Harden that sold only its own designs and made clothes to order. In 1930, Harden sold her share of the company to Hawes, who kept the business going during the Great Depression. In 1931, she presented her collection in Paris, which won her a great deal of media attention. Along with Annette Simpson and Edith Reuss, Hawes is credited with creating an "American style." She was an advocate of trousers for women and followed her own advice.
Eventually, she moved into making ready-to-wear clothes. In 1937, she married director Joseph Losey, with whom she had a son. The following year, she published Fashion Is Spinach, an autobiography and exposé of the fashion industry. After that, she published Men Can Take It (1939) and closed her clothing business. She wrote a column for PM, a left-learning daily newspaper.

In 1942, during World War II, she got a night job at an airplane factory to personally experience the life of women machine operators. She used her experiences as the basis for a 1943 book called Why Women Cry or, Wenches with Wrenches. After the war, Hawes worked for a time as a union organizer for the United Auto Workers focusing on women. She wrote Hurry Up Please It's Time (1946), describing sexual and racial discrimination in the union movement. In 1950, she moved to the U.S. Virgin Islands and worked as a freelance writer and designer for Priscilla of Boston. Hawes settled in Southern California in the early 1950s, where she experimented with the production of knitwear decorated with abstract patterns.