" . . . Ultimately, more than 10 million visitors engaged with American fashion at the New York World's Fair 1939-40, crystallizing a collective consciousness around American fashion and individual designers that fostered success of American fashion in the years that followed. In exploring fashion at the New York World's Fair 1939-40, this dissertation brings attention to a subject that has been largely ignored by scholars. Today, the New York World's Fair 1939-40 is best remembered for the streamlined industrial design aesthetic and the ascendant role of private corporations in creating a future vision of American consumerism. Scholarship around the New York World's Fair 1939-1940 has centered on the activities of men, especially the work of male industrial designers who were engaged to create the conceptual and aesthetic look of the Fair. Fashion at the New York World's Fair is the story about women's achievements and has been ignored. This dissertation centers gender as a factor in the early challenges that surrounded planning for fashion at the New York World's Fair 1939-40 and recovers the contributions of Marcia Conner and Mary Lewis in launching American fashion at the New York World's Fair 1939-1940. In addition, this dissertation creates a framework for understanding how the New York World's Fair 1939-1940 functioned as a crucible for collective consciousness around the American fashion and its individual designers that secured validation in the eyes of the public"-- from Abstract.

This qualifying paper explores the role that fashion played in the 1939-1940 New York World’s Fair at Flushing Meadow in Queens, New York. How was fashion integrated into the development and design of the fair? Did the attempt to include fashion differ between the fashion industry and other industries present at the fair? With international representation, did involvement differ between countries present at the fair? What role – if any – did American fashion designers have at the fair? To answer these questions, I examined the New York Public Library World’s Fair archive extensively, as well as other historical collections. The results are presented in the form of an exhibition proposal, an interpretive plan that could be used in future to share these important primary source documents, mainly photographs, with a wider audience. This rich resource of materials has not yet been exhibited or seen by the public, aside from individual researchers accessing the collection. I believe that using an object-based approach with accompanying didactics allows an accessible entry point into the many sociopolitical, economic and fashion historical context surrounding each object. I found that the official themes for each year of the fair – The World of Tomorrow (1939) and For Peace and Freedom (1940) - doubled as undercurrent themes found in the incorporation of fashion in the fair over both years. Therefore, I organized the two main sections of the exhibition under those titles. The last section playfully explores fashion in fair merchandising and the press, paralleling as a virtual “exit through the gift shop” for exhibition attendees.

In 1939, fashion became an economic and symbolic sphere of great importance in France. Invasive textile legislation, rationing and threats from German and American couturiers were pushing the design and trade of Parisian style to its limits. It is widely accepted that French fashion was severely curtailed as a result, isolated from former foreign clients and deposed of its crown as global queen of fashion. This pioneering book offers a different story. Arguing that Paris retained its hold on the international haute couture industry right throughout WWII, eminent dress historians and curators come together to show that, amid political, economic and cultural traumas, Paris fashion remained very much alive under the Nazi occupation – and on an international level. Bringing exciting perspectives to challenge a familiar story and introducing new overseas trade links out of occupied France, this book takes us from the salons of renowned couturiers such as Edward Molyneux and Robert Piguet, French Vogue and Le Jardin des Modes and luxury Lyon silk factories, to Rio de Janeiro, Denmark and Switzerland, and the great American department stores of New York. Also comparing extravagant Paris occupation styles to austerity fashions of the UK and USA, parallel industrial and design developments highlight the unresolvable tension between luxury fashion and the everyday realities of wartime life. Showing that Paris strove to maintain world dominance as leader of couture through fashion journalism, photography and exported fashion forecasting, Paris Fashion and World War Two makes a significant contribution to the cultural history of fashion.