The lost art of dress The women who once made America stylish

In this well-researched, engagingly written work, Przybyszewski (Notre Dame) seeks to restore to history those women who, in the first half of the 20th century, attempted to set standards of dress for American women increasingly active in public life. Many of these so-called "dress doctors" were indeed women holding advanced degrees and teaching on the college level in then-respected home economic departments. Reaching out to young women on college campuses and in high schools and 4-H Clubs across the country, the dress doctors wanted to impart the necessary knowledge of how to dress appropriately yet stylishly and always economically--thus, the emphasis on home sewing. The dress doctors were also prolific authors. In dozens of textbooks and countless articles, they shared their advice, encouraging women to be confident in both their appearance and their abilities. It would be the countercultural revolution of the 1960s that would bring the beginning of the end for the dress doctors and their sage advice. Interestingly, Przybyszewski is both a scholar and a prize-winning dressmaker, and her passion and understanding of the latter is evident in this spirited, informative book. --Kathleen Banks Nutter, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College

FIVE YEARS AGO Ruth Bader Ginsburg, associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, flung open her closet to Brian Lamb, the founder of C-SPAN. "You know the standard robe is made for a man," she told him in an interview recently re-enacted by the experimental theater group Elevator Repair Service. She displayed a black English cloak adorned with a collar of delicate white lace from Cape Town. "Sandra Day O'Connor and I thought it would be appropriate if we included as part of our robe something typical of a woman. So" - this with the combination of relish and rue familiar to any clotheshorse - "I have many, many collars." "What's the symbolism of this being from South Africa and this from England, anything?" Lamb asked with a helpless male choppy gesture. "No symbolism," Ginsburg replied, appearing ever so slightly amused, "except I liked the style." In her towering wisdom, the associate justice perhaps also appreciates that the noncolor black, a favorite for day among sophisticated urban women from Nora Ephron to Joan Jett since at least the 1980s, and for night five decades before that, is not necessarily the most flattering to the complexion. Maybe that's why the Victorians reserved it for mourning. "Worn near the face, black deepens the appearance of shadows and lines," Linda Przybyszewski warns, drawing from the collective advice of a forgotten group of 20th-century sartorial experts she has unearthed, dusted off and christened the Dress Doctors. Instead, she suggests, "Find a smoky blue that plays off your eyes, a rich burgundy that throws warmth into your face, a golden brown just a shade darker or lighter than your hair. See if you don't feel better." There is no shortage of such fashion counsel in modern American life, thanks to the indefatigable persistence of glossy magazines like Harper's Bazaar and Vogue (whose editor, Anna Wintour, is a famous opponent of black too); crowd-sourcing websites like Polyvore and Pose; and popular television shows like "What Not to Wear." But still Przybyszewski, an associate professor of history at the University of Notre Dame and devoted amateur seamstress, surveys our wardrobes and sees chaos, cheapness and contemptible sexual pandering. "Has luring men become our only standard for beauty in dress?" she wonders with a note of dismay that sounds throughout her research (which clearly does not extend to the oeuvre of Leandra Medine, who writes a fashion blog called The Man Repeller). "Living in an age when the only standard of female attractiveness is hotness, and when every detail of life is offered up on Facebook, young women find it normal that the whole world, not just their sweetheart, their gynecologist and their mother, should know the exact shape of their bodies." Following a well-respected biography of another Supreme Court justice, John Marshall Harlan, Przybyszewski's new book is a noble though probably doomed effort to redress, pun intended, this sorry situation. Doomed, I fear, because the forces of cheap, fast fashion that she decries - H&M, Uniqlo, Zara, et al. - have become so powerful and ubiquitous, flaming red flags about the industry's production methods, like the 2013 collapse of Rana Plaza in Bangladesh that killed over 1,000 workers, notwithstanding. First-world women seem far more focused on the source of their organic juice than they do their T-shirts; also maybe less interested in dressing for social life, as they curl inward, potato-bug-like, to their computing devices. I have not (yet?) tried them, but the reports of Google Glass suggest to me blinders, the famous J.R. Eyerman photo of a movie audience transfixed by 3-D at the Paramount Theater in 1952 writ small; how quickly with selfies and outlandish "street style" we have gone from "The Society of the Spectacle," as the French theorist Guy Debord called it, to the spectacle of the society. PRZYBYSZEWSKI BELIEVES THE recent obsession with footwear is evidence of this growing narcissism; the Dress Doctors drew not from pop culture to advise on outfits, but principles of painting, proportion and balance (in more ways than one, advocating practical low heels rather than the precarious platforms and stilettos du jour). "Thinking of your appearance as a composition means imagining how others see you," she writes. "Looking at your shoes is seeing yourself entirely from your own perspective." The author would like to resurrect the hat, returning focus and protection to the face. Also, gloves, to "prevent (and hide) age spots," obviating the need for expensive and painful laser treatments. And a, yes, laundry list of other long-languishing garments, about which it is a genuine pleasure to read. By all means bring back beach pajamas, their legs "so wide that the garment could easily be mistaken for a dress," creating a "playful swirl of fabric as you move"! Ditto the housecoat, proud descendant of the tea gown, "made up in lovely pastel shades of silk and lace." Yea, would that we were serving cookies and conversation to friends in bracingly crisp powder-blue taffeta, rather than schlumping to Starbucks for the free Wi-Fi, clad in what Przybyszewski despairingly calls "our velour tracksuits and yoga pants." MANY FASHIONS OF THE PAST, of course, no longer make sense, if they ever did. Przybyszewski concedes that dead songbirds adorned a lot of those vaunted hats, enraging ornithologists. Trains of fabric were once a regular thing, not just hobbling starlets on the red carpet as they do now, but dragging along the communal gutter, gathering germs. And given the current mass paranoia about gluten, I doubt there is much future in the flour sack dress, a mainstay of the Depression. Befitting her profession, the author is skilled at analyzing the past, but her grip on current trends seems a little shakier and occasionally a little schoolmarmish. The idea that today's "most common yardstick of attractiveness is who's wearing the shortest dress," as she harrumphs, is demonstrably false; hemlines are all over the map. Nor do "we make do today with only a few styles in ready-to-wear day dresses"; the rise of the Internet, in fact, means that as with pornography, there is no fetish that cannot be satisfied. If the Sassy Sistah in South Bend, Ind., is not doing it for Przybyszewski, she can turn to Farfetch.com, which stocks items from boutiques in places as far-flung as Andorra and Saudi Arabia, or more thriftily Etsy, where the crafts of home economics and 4-H clubs, not to mention vintage examples of the clothing she misses, like capes, brooches and even detachable collars, have enjoyed a spirited revival among creative millennials. But her diagnosis of affluenza lurking in America's bureaus is correct in its fundamentals. And like another forgotten artifact, the hope chest, her remedial book is most delightfully and fragrantly packed. "Clothes should be chosen for the places we go," primly proclaims one Dress Doctor applauded by Przybyszewski, "not for the places we would like to go." I just happen to prefer the words of the costume designer Edith Head: "You can do anything you want in life if you dress for it." 'Has luring men become our only standard for beauty in dress?'