The Wake

The four American designers highlighted in the exhibit at McNeal Hall on the St. Paul Campus emerged in the 1940s and are considered monumental in closing the gap between European and United States fashion. Together, Norman Norell, Pauline Trigere, Geoffrey Beene and Bill Blass transformed America into a flourishing world of fashion in a post-World War II environment.

Norman Norell was born in 1900 in Indiana. He broke new ground by translating French couture into fresh-looking, ready-to-wear apparel. He made New York’s 7th Avenue garment district the rival of Paris at the end of WWII. By 1928 he had become the head designer for highly respected fashion designer, Hattie Carnegie, who imported European designs for inspiration. In 1960 he started his own label and perfected the jumper and the pantsuit. He has been called the Rolls Royce of the fashion industry.

Pauline Trigere was born to Russian-Jewish parents in 1909. She was known for her imaginative tailoring of women’s suits and coats. She was raised in Paris by parents who also had an interest in tailoring. Her father made military uniforms for the Russian aristocracy and her mother made dresses. Trigere operated a sewing machine by the age of 10. She moved to New York in the 1930s and by 1945 had started a well-respected label. Her technique included draping and cutting fabric on the model. She wore her own designs with a signature turtle pin on the shoulder or cuff. “The turtle stands for longevity,” she would say. She continued to design until her death in 2002.

Bill Blass was born in 1922 in Indiana. He joined the Maurice Rentner firm in 1959, where he was able to develop into a world-renowned designer. In 1970 Blass bought the firm and the label and designed for famous clients such as Nancy Reagan. He was one of the first in the industry to license his name to other products including chocolates. “Sometimes the eye gets so accustomed that if you don’t have a change you get bored. It’s the same with fashion you know and that, I suppose, is what fashion is really about,” Blass says.

Geoffrey Beene was born in 1924 as Samuel Albert Bozeman in Louisiana. Beene originally began training in the field of medicine but dropped out to pursue fashion. He opened his own shop on 7th Avenue in New York and in 1963 released his first collection, which was an immediate hit. Beene was acknowledged by the fashion world for his innovated techniques. “The whole point of design is to make people feel better about themselves and fashion is one of the professions that accomplishes that,” Beene once said.

The guest curators of the exhibit, Dolores DeFore and Gloria Hogan, chose these four artists specifically because, to them, these were the four designers working in America that had the biggest impact on the changes that took place in fashion design after World War II. “They felt that other designers followed,” says Barbara Porwit, Administrator for the Goldstein Museum of Design. “Another factor in choosing these designers was the longevity of their influence; each one individually had a career that spanned fifty years.”

A number of graduate and undergraduate students at the University of Minnesota contributed to the development of this show. All of the graphic identity, panels, titles and publications were designed by U of M design students, specifically Eric Price and Tyler Stevermer. Special recognition should also be given to the students of the Material Culture and Design class who researched the biographies on all of the designs displayed.

The entire exhibit was produced, created and funded by students, faculty and the University. “It’s not a traveling exhibit that we paid for,” Porwit says. “All the displays were donated to the Goldstein Museum of Design. It is a very unique exhibit to the University and something that we should be proud of.”

The Goldstein Museum of Design is the only museum of design in the country that is specifically housed in a university’s college of design.

The exhibit runs until Jan. 7 and is sponsored by the Goldstein Museum of Design in McNeal Hall. Contact for more information.