Gordon Conway : fashioning a new woman / Raye Virginia Allen ; foreword by William H. Goetzmann.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Allen, Raye Virginia.

Series:

American studies series

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Conway, Gordon, 1894-1956.

Conway, Gordon.

Women costume designers--United States--Biography.

Women costume designers.

United States.

Fashion illustrators--United States--Biography.

Fashion illustrators.

Genre:

Biographies.

Physical Description:

xv, 304 pages, 16 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations (some color) ; 28 cm.

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

Austin : University of Texas Press, 1997.

Summary:

A new kind of woman emerged in the teens and twenties, one who believed that "with the right kind of face cream, or mouth wash, and a little aid from the beauticians, she will become a creature whom Dante would have loved and Casanova would have died for". Or so hoped the publishers of glossy magazines such as Vogue, Vanity Fair, and Harper's Bazaar, who filled their pages with fashionable images of the New Woman and the glamorous Jazz Age society she inhabited.

This book profiles a woman who helped to create the New Woman -- Gordon Conway. Raye Virginia Allen follows the whole course of Conway's life (1894-1956) from her Dallas upbringing in a wealthy society family through her working years in New York, London, and Paris to her premature retirement and early death at the family estate in Virginia.

Gordon Conway became an illustrator for Vanity Fair at the age of twenty and an accomplished fashion artist. She went on to an illustrious career in design that encompassed publicity campaigns for Broadway musicals, costume and set designs for cabaret in Paris, and the management of the first autonomous costume department at a major British film studio. This record of her career, drawn from extensive archival materials never before published, underscores the role that women played in creating the image of the flapper or New Woman of the 1920s, as well as the limits of their influence.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [279]-287) and index.

ISBN:

0292704593

0292704704

OCLC:

35796487