Author seeks to re-dress America in the age of fast fashion

The Department of Textiles, Merchandising and Fashion Design will host a free public lecture and book signing by Linda Przybyszewski, author of "The Lost Art of Dress: The Women Who Once Made America Stylish," at 5 p.m. April 20 in the Nebraska Union Auditorium.

Przybyszewski's talk is being presented in conjunction with the exhibition "Modernism and Romanticism: An American Design Approach," featuring the work of fashion designers Bill Blass, Geoffrey Beene and Oscar de la Renta, opening April 20 in the Robert Hillestad Textiles Gallery on East Campus.

Przybyszewski is an associate professor in the Department of History at the University of Notre Dame, where she teaches courses on legal and cultural history, including crime, the gap between popular and academic history, the era of the U.S. Civil War and Reconstruction, and the history of fashion and dress. She has been awarded research fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Program in Law and Public Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University, the Virginia Center for the Humanities, the Institute for Legal Studies at the Law School at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the Mellon Foundation, among others. She is a member of Phi Beta Kappa.  

"The Lost Art of Dress" explains how Americans learned -- and forgot -- how to dress in the modern age. It draws on Przybyszewski's own collection of more than 700 dress and sewing manuals dating from the early 1900s, as well as research she conducted in numerous archives and libraries.

A skilled dressmaker from a long line of sewing women, Przybyszewski re-created garments from every decade of the 20th century as part of the research for her book. These included the one-hour dress that swept the nation in the 1920s, and the dishtowel dress, which she describes as a "bad idea from the 1970s." She tested the "Dress Doctors" prescription for thrift with variety by creating a many-way dress with several changes of collars and cuffs.

The Dress Doctors were a group of women, for the most part academics, who over the course of the first half of the 20th century taught Americans what to wear. Via clothing clubs, pamphlets and home economics courses, they instructed young women on how to put together a wardrobe that emphasized thrift and beauty. The Dress Doctors felt women were embarking on a new era of civic and social engagement and needed to learn how to look the part. Now in a time of fast fashion, where price and novelty rule, the lessons of the Dress Doctors have largely been forgotten. Przybyszewski has set out to resurrect their teachings.

The roster of Dress Doctors includes two names with Nebraska ties. Ruth O'Brien held a master's degree in chemistry from the University of Nebraska and became chief of the Division of Textiles and Clothing at the USDA's Bureau of Home Economics in 1923. Grace Margaret Morton, an associate professor of home economics and head of the textiles and clothing division at the University of Nebraska, wrote the widely influential textbook "The Arts of Costume and Personal Appearance."

In addition to her public lecture at the Nebraska Union, Przybyszewski will meet with students and faculty in several courses and small group conversations in the Department of Textiles, Merchandising and Fashion Design and the Department of History. The lecture is funded and co-sponsored by the Dean's Office of the College of Education and Human Sciences, the UNL Faculty Senate Convocations Committee, the Department of History, the Women and Gender Studies Program, and the Friends of the Robert Hillestad Textiles Gallery.

For more information, contact the department office at 402-472-2911.