Elizabeth Hawes on Pregnancy Fashion, 1938

"I'm Going to Have a Baby"

One of America’s greatest fashion thinkers (and designers), Elizabeth Hawes, turned her sharp mind to the question of maternity clothes during her own pregnancy in 1938. Months after publishing her first book, Fashion Is Spinach—one of the finest (and wittiest) critiques of the fashion industry ever written—Hawes wrote an essay for the June 15th issue of Vogue on prenatal dress. As always, Hawes’ opinions on the matter were defined and unshakable; as she wrote, a pregnant woman should be concerned solely with being comfortable (a key tenant of her design philosophy) and being neat—fashion’s desire to “look thin” being necessarily thrown out in favor of smocks.

Fashion Is Spinach (1938): cover designed by Alexey Brodovitch.

"Le Gaulois,” a silk dress by Elizabeth Hawes, Hawes Incorporated, 1938. Brooklyn Museum Costume Collection at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of the Brooklyn Museum, 2009; 2009.300.1935.

At the time, Hawes’ career was riding high. Fashion Is Spinach was a major bestseller with Hawes now in demand as a speaker. Her opinions on “fashion vs. style” were much reported upon in the press with just about every Seventh Avenue designer and manufacturer weighing in—usually on the side of fashion, unlike Hawes who had called fashion a “parasite on style” and said “fashion swings the female population this way and that through the magic expression that ‘they’ are wearing such and such this season and you must do likewise or be ostracized.” Regardless, all the controversy was a boon for business and her name recognition. The summer before she had married stage (and later film) director Joseph Losey, and now she was pregnant with their child. Other than this essay (reprinted below), her pregnancy was not publicized. An interview from April, when she would have been approximately 6 to 7 months pregnant, describes Hawes as wearing a “frock of dark wire-red crepe, with front-shirred skirt, and severely draped waist.” Though pregnancy was commonly ignored publicly at the time, there is no mention of her likely obvious belly and how, as a fashion designer, she had elegantly endeavored to hide it through smart design decisions.

New York Times, May 24, 1938.

On July 5th, Elizabeth Hawes showed the first wholesale collection of her own manufacture (previously all of her designs were made-to-order or licensed to other firms) yet she did not attend the show; the following day, she gave birth to her son, Gavrik Losey, at New York Hospital. For the most part, motherhood appears to have had little immediate effect on her designs. Hawes didn’t slow down or even seem to take a break—within months she was back on the road, giving talks on fashion and showing her designs at department stores and women’s groups. For her fall private client collection, shown that September, Elizabeth did introduce a new smock-inspired silhouette that perhaps came from the smocks she so enthusiastically spoke of in the Vogue essay; it was described as having the “wide-spreading smock contour, with fulness spreading from the chest, sometime back and front and again just in front.”