The UCLA Library has acquired the archive of fashion designer Bonnie Cashin (1908 - 2000), one of America’s foremost designers from the second half of the 20th century. This comprehensive archive encompasses complete documentation of her fashion and costume designs, including sketches, photographs and slides. It also contains her writings on fashion and other design-related subjects; notebooks, sketchbooks, travel books and idea books; audio- and videotapes of interviews with her; and business correspondence, contracts and other documents from and to the companies that produced her designs.
It is accompanied by a gift of $1.5 million, which will be used to enhance its accessibility. More than $1 million will support the archive itself, including processing and digital projects. The balance of $500,000 has been used to establish the Bonnie Cashin Endowed Lecture Series, which will showcase the work of those who, like Cashin, push the boundaries of creative expression in all fields of endeavor. The archive is a gift of the Bonnie Cashin Estate.
“We are deeply honored that the trustees of Bonnie Cashin’s estate have entrusted her archive to the UCLA Library,� stated University Librarian Gary E. Strong. “With the addition of these remarkable materials to our existing holdings, researchers will now have access to an extraordinary range of materials in the area of mid-century modernism, including the papers of architects Richard Neutra and A. Quincy Jones, designers Rudi Gernreich and Max and Rita Lawrence, and artist June Wayne.�
Cashin’s stylish yet practical designs in materials ranging from leather and suede to cashmere and tweed earned her acclaim as a pioneer in the sportswear industry. In 1950 Cashin became the first designer to earn the industry’s two highest honors, the Neiman Marcus Award and the Coty American Fashion Critics Special Award, in the same year. She went on to earn numerous prestigious honors including the London Sunday Times International Fashion Award in 1963 and was inducted into the Coty American Fashion Critics Hall of Fame in 1972.
“During the time of Bonnie Cashin’s rise to national prominence, the UCLA department of art offered undergraduate and graduate courses in costume design,� recalled Bernard Kester, professor emeritus of art. “Among the many fashion designers the students learned about, Cashin became their favorite because her work consistently expressed a casual lifestyle through simplicity of form. It is appropriate that this important archive be located at UCLA to serve as
a vital resource for aspiring young designers in courses now offered by the School of Theater, Film and Television.�
Born in Fresno, Calif., Cashin worked as an apprentice in her mother’s dressmaking shops while she was growing up. During her teen years she became a fashion illustrator and costume designer, creating costumes for the Los Angeles dance troupe Fanchon and Marco and for the chorus line at New York’s Roxy Theater.
In 1937 Cashin became head designer for Adler and Adler, a prestigious coat and suit manufacturer. Her work soon earned her national recognition, and when World War II broke out, she was commissioned to design the uniforms for Civilian Defense units. However, she soon felt her creativity being limited by wartime restrictions on materials, so she moved to Los Angeles to work for Twentieth-Century Fox. Between 1943 and 1949 she designed costumes for female characters in more than 60 films including “Laura� (1944), “Anna and the King of Siam� (1946) and “A Tree Grown in Brooklyn� (1946), as well as off-screen fashions for actresses’ personal wardrobes.
In 1949 Cashin returned to New York to design ready-to-wear clothes for Adler and Adler again. Shortly thereafter, however, feeling constrained by the manufacturer’s control over her creativity, she decided to challenge the traditional business model of the fashion industry and began to work with multiple manufacturers to sell clothing in a variety of price ranges.
In 1953 Cashin initiated the use of leather in high fashion in a partnership with Philip Sills, a leather importer and craftsman. Designs from this period introduced the concept of “layering,� with flexible ensembles in which layers could be added or removed to adapt to different temperatures, a concept she said was inspired by Chinese tradition.
Cashin became the first designer of Coach handbags in 1962. Inspired by the hardware on the convertible top of her sports car, she created the brass toggle that became Coach’s hallmark and revolutionized the handbag industry with designs that could be folded flat and employed shoulder straps, in contrast to contemporary rigid, hand-held designs.
For other manufacturers Cashin designed cashmere separates, gloves, canvas totes, at-home gowns and robes, raincoats, umbrellas and furs. She also ran The Knittery, a consortium of British mills that produced unique sweaters knit to shape rather than cut and sewn. She retired from design in 1985 to concentrate on painting and philanthropy.
Highlights of the archive include some 3,000 sketches of Cashin’s ready-to-wear designs. Many of these ink, pencil and watercolor illustrations include her notes about where the clothes should be worn and swatches of leather and fabric. Her essays on each of these collections and slides of the finished designs provide further background.
More than 500 childhood and adolescent fashion illustrations, many of which also include annotations and swatches, document her early development. Black-and-white photographs of her costumes for Fanchon and Marco show the finished pieces.
Materials related to her film work include film stills and watercolor sketches of her costumes for “Laura,� “Anna and the King of Siam� and “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn� and sketches of her off-screen wardrobe designs. Supplementing these are her notes on designing for actresses including June Havoc and Gene Tierney and essays on the films.
Cashin experimented extensively with paper as an inexpensive alternative to textiles, and the archive includes clothes, samples and documentation of this work. Particularly noteworthy is a tufted paper Noh coat tied with lime-green leather.
The archive also includes 25 oversized volumes of clippings about Cashin’s work from national and international press, which also provide an extensive overview of 20th-century fashion. Journals and traveling sketchbooks from the early 1950s to her death contain text and quick sketches of design ideas, and textile swatch books show the materials she used, many of which she designed in conjunction with the manufacturer. Extensive business and personal correspondence documents her relationship with manufacturers and friends throughout the course of her life.
The archive will be housed in the Charles E. Young Research Library Department of Special Collections. An exhibition, “‘Chic Is Where You Find It’: Selections From the Bonnie Cashin Collection of Theater, Film and Fashion Design,� will be on view in the department from Jan. 14 through March 25. It is organized by Stephanie Day Iverson, curator of the collection and a Ph.D. candidate at the Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design and Culture in New York, who currently is working on her dissertation on Cashin.
About the Department of Special Collections
The Department of Special Collections was created in 1946 to administer the UCLA Library’s rare and unique materials in the humanities and social sciences. Recognized today as one of the country’s top special-collections departments, it is supported by the circulating holdings of the Charles E. Young Research Library, where the department now resides.
The department provides primary resources for instruction and research in the humanities and social sciences. The principal academic programs it serves are art history; classics; comparative literature; English; French; Germanic languages; history; Italian; lesbian, gay and bisexual studies; Near Eastern languages and cultures; philosophy; political science; sociology; urban planning; and world arts and cultures. Centers supported include African American Studies, American Indian Studies, Asian American Studies, Chicana and Chicano Studies, Jewish Studies, Latin American Studies, Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 17th- and 18th?CenturyStudies and the Study of Women.
The department’s collections and programs encompass rare books and pamphlets from the 15th through the 20th centuries; extensive manuscript holdings; drawings, including original architectural drawings; early maps and atlases; and photographs, prints and paintings. Collections also contain artifacts, audiotape and videotape recordings, oral history transcripts, phonograph records, postcards and posters. The department also manages the University Archives.