About this item
As a glance down any street in America quickly reveals, American women have forgotten how to dress. We chase fads, choose inappropriate materials and unattractive cuts, and waste energy tottering in heels when we could be moving gracefully. Quite simply, we lack the fashion know-how we need to dress professionally and flatteringly.As historian and expert dressmaker Linda Przybyszewski reveals in The Lost Art of Dress, it wasn't always like this. In the first half of the twentieth century, a remarkable group of women - the so-called Dress Doctors - taught American women how to stretch each yard of fabric and dress well on a budget. Knowledge not money, they insisted, is the key to timeless fashion. Based in Home Economics departments across the country, the Dress Doctors offered advice on radio shows, at women's clubs, and in magazines.
About the Author
Linda Przybyszewski grew up outside of Chicago, attended Northwestern University, and earned her Ph.D. in U.S. History at Stanford University. She was trained as a legal historian, but she also comes from a long line of sewing women, and these two sets of skills -- research and dressmaking-- come together in her latest book. She may be the only person to have lectured at the U.S. Supreme Court in a suit she made herself. Professor Pski teaches at the University of Notre Dame.
