Bonnie Cashin (September 28, 1908 – February 3, 2000) was an American designer, she is considered to be one of the pioneering designers of American sportswear. She created innovative, uncomplicated clothing that catered to modern, independent woman of the post-war era through to her retirement from the fashion world in 1985. BiographyBonnie Cashin was born on September 28, 1908 in Oakland, California to Carl Cashin, a photographer and inventor, and Eunice Cashin, a dressmaker. The family lived in several towns in northern California during Cashin's early years, and in each, her mother would open a custom dress shop. In a 1973 interview, Cashin explained her interest in fashion: "My mother was a dressmaker and before I could write I could sew." During high school in Hollywood, Cashin was hired by a Los Angeles ballet and theatrical revue company, Fanchon and Marco, to help make costumes for its productions. After she graduated in 1925, Cashin became its full-time designer. In 1934, Cashin moved with the ballet company to New York City to work at the Roxy Theater, where she created three costume changes per week for each of the theater's 24 dancers, known as the "Roxyettes." Owing to her deceivingly youthful appearance, Variety is reported to have described Cashin as "the youngest designer to ever hit Broadway." In 1937, at the urging of Harper's Bazaar editor Carmel Snow, sportswear manufacturer Louis Adler offered her a job. She was hesitant to accept, stating, "The profit-conscious, business-like atmosphere of Seventh Avenue seemed very different to me from the atmosphere around the theater. I felt more at home with dancers, actors, artists, musicians, writers--people like that--than I did with most of the business men I met in the clothing industry." While in New York, Cashin studied at the Art Students League of New York. After the U.S. entered World War II, Cashin designed uniforms for women in the armed force. In 1943, Cashin returned to Hollywood and costume design. In the early 1940s Cashin was married briefly to Disney illustrator and art director Robert Sterner. The marriage ended in divorce, and they had no children. After producer William Perlberg recruited her, Cashin joined 20th Century Fox and created clothes for about sixty films including Laura (1944), Anna and the King of Siam (1946), and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1946). Cashin enjoyed the work in Hollywood, explaining: "I wasn't designing for fashion, but for characteristics, which is the way I like to design clothes for daily wear. I like to design clothes for a woman who plays a particular role in life, not simply to design clothes that follow a certain trend, or that express some new silhouette." In 1949, Cashin returned to New York City. There, she designed the first sportswear collection with her name on the label for her previous employer, Adler and Adler. In 1950, her introduction of her term an concept of "layering" led to winning both her first Coty Award as well as the Neiman Marcus Award, an unprecedented feat in the fashion world. In 1952, she opened her own business, Bonnie Cashin Designs. Cashin was the first designer chosen for Patterns of The Times, American Designer Series, which was a monthly feature in The New York Times during the 1950s that made designer patterns available for home sewing. Cashin was a rare female CEO, and her mother was her company's only other major stakeholder, with a one-percent stake. Up until her mother's death in 1963, the two lived in adjoining apartments in midtown Manhattan, where her mother sewed Cashin's samples for major manufacturers. Cashin was famous for her witty and ingenious approaches to designing for mobility, including a dog leash skirt: a long wool skirt that could be instantly shortened for walking up stairs by latching a small brass ring sewn at the bottom to a small brass clasp sewn into the waistline. In an interview with National Public Radio, Cashin explained the origin of the skirt: "My studio, out in the country, in Briarcliff, in the old carriage house, had steps that went up to a second floor. And I was constantly holding my skirts going up. I entertained a lot. And I'd be running up stairs with a martini in my hand. And so I thought I'd better hitch my skirt permanently." In 1962, Cashin was hired by Miles and Lillian Cahn as the first designer for Coach, a newly-formed women's accessory business. Coach was a division of their wholesale men's accessory company, Gail Leather Products, and internally, it was referred to as "the Bonnie Cashin account," as she was a contracted designer, never a Gail Leather or Coach employee. Her classic designs for Gail's Coach division during the early 1960s included the shopping bag tote, the bucket bag, shoulder bag and a clutch-style purse with a removable shoulder strap. In 1964, Cashin introduced a brass turn lock/toggle fastening that was featured on her designs produced by the Cahns as well as on all garment and accessory collections produced by a range of manufacturers in the US and abroad, including Philip Sills, Meyers, Crescendoe-Superb, HBA, and D. Klein. Cashin designed two small collections for the Cahns each year to complement her garment designs for other manufacturers until 1974. In 1975, Meyers Manufacturing took over the production of her signature handbag designs. Cashin designed for over thirty-five firms including Hermès and Ballantyne, always with her signature on the label. She also created the first-ever designer flight attendants’ uniforms for American Airlines. In the 1970s, Cashin met Amy Vanderbilt's then-husband Curtis Kellar, who was head counsel for Mobil Oil. Follwing Vanderbilt's death, Cashin and Kellar began a romance that lasted until Cashin's death. They never married. In 1972, Cashin founded The Knittery, which produced limited edition collections of coats and handmade Scottish sweaters. That year, she was inducted into the Coty American Fashion Critics Hall of Fame. In 1979, she established the Innovative Design Fund, a nonprofit organization based in New York that gave up to $10,000 to designers with original ideas in home furnishings, textiles, and fashion so they could transform their sketches into marketable products. Cashin died in Manhattan on February 3, 2000, due to complications from open-heart surgery. Toward the end of her life, Cashin granted exclusive and unrestricted access to her personal design archive to design scholar Stephanie Lake, whom Cashin described as her "little sister".
The Bonnie Cashin Archive, the designer's personal design archive, is privately owned in its entirety by Dr. Stephanie Lake, who published a definitive monograph on the designer, Bonnie Cashin: Chic is Where You Find It in 2016 by Rizzoli. In 2019 (as reported by Women's Wear Daily), Lake and her husband Cory opened the archive to collaborative partnerships. The Bonnie Cashin Archive and its projects have no affiliation with any Cashin trademarks registered in the decades since Cashin's death. Cashin herself never registered her name. Bonnie Cashin's work is housed in over forty museums across the US and she is often cited for creating both the concept of layering clothing and for coining the term. The idea of layering came from time she spent in living near San Francisco's Chinatown as a young girl. She also pioneered the use of leather, mohair and hardware in her design. Inspired by the brass turnlocks that secured the top of her 1940s convertible, the hardware became a signature feature of all of her designs, including her Coach handbags.
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original name: Simone Micheline Bodin birth place: Laval, France birth date: 8 May 1925 zodiac sign: Taurus death place: Paris France death date: 2 March 2015 Occupation: Model, socialite Height: 170cm Languages: French Profile of Betina GrazianiSimone Micheline Bodin (8 May 1925 – 2 March 2015), known professionally as Bettina or Bettina Graziani, was a French fashion model of the 1940s and 1950s and an early muse to the fashion designer Hubert de Givenchy. She was a designer of knitwear and, later, a poet and composer. Life of Bettina GrazianiBorn in Britanny and grew up in Normandy in North-West France, Simone Micheline Bodin was from a humble family. Her father, a railway worker abandoned the family, and she was raised by her mother together with her elder sister. Simone Bodin learned drawing as a teenager and wanted to become fashion designer one day. After the end of World War II, Simone Bodin went to Paris with her fashion sketches. There she met the young Parisian designer Jacques Costet hoping for a job, but Jacques took a look at her, put her into a green velvet dress and an haute couture model was born. If one Jacques had decided her fate, another Jacques would make her immortal. While working for Jacques Costet, Simone Bodin met Gilbert "Benno" Graziani (1922-2018), a French photographer and reporter, and one of the cofounders of Paris Match, it was love at first sight, she ran away from the designer studio and her career and went to live with Benno Graziani in the south of France. They got married in Paris in 1946. Simone Bodine became Simone Graziani, she was 21. The marriage went sour the same year, however, and the fashion house of Jacques Costet was closed. Simone Bodin then went to work for Lucien Lelong, but quickly got bored because of the strict ambience there, and applied job in Maison Jacques Fath who engaged her immediately and her salary multiplied 5 times. But what Jacques Fath gave her, was much more than a significant increase of income, he gave her a new name, a new identity. Shortly after she joined Jacques Fath, he told her, "We already have a Simone; you look to me like a Bettina.", thus another Simone would disappear, and the Bettina would walk onto the stage and into history. "Jacques Fath was a star. He was full of life, and he loved life. He loved everything that was 'glamour.'"
In the next four years, the new created Bettina became the muse of Fath, and she also worked with fashion magazines, posing for fashion houses of Madame Grès, Pierre Balmain, or Christian Dior. Bettina´s photo wearing the New Look bar suit of Christian Dior is perhaps one of the most iconic fashion photoes in the history, but she represented the elegant and modern Parisian woman, younger than those created by Christian Dior or Pierre Balmain. In late 1940s she became one of the century's first supermodels, rivalled only by Barbara Goalen. Around 1950, Bettina decided to leave Jacques Fath and dedicated herself to being magazine model. While travelling to the United States for Vogue photo shooting, Bettina joined Eileen Ford model agency. Not long after, she divorced Benno Graziani. In 1952, When Hubert de Givenchy (who had worked as the assistant of Jacques Fath) launched his own fashion house in Paris, Bettina joined him, as his muse, model and directrice, organizing Givenchy´s first collection, asking her friends like Suzy Parker, Ivy Nicholson and Sophie Litvak, some of the most famous models of the time to walk the runway. And Givenchy named one of designs of his first collection after her, naming a Byronesque white blouse "Bettina blouse", which would later inspire the design of the bottle for Givenchy´s best-selling perfume "Amarige".
Bettina stayed with Hubert de Givenchy for two years, devoting her time and energy to helping the aristocratic couturier, at times walking on runway as model and times working for the public relations of the fashion house. But her life was going to change dramatically yet again. After the short marriage to Benno Graziani ended, Bettina became the companion of Peter Viertel, the American screenwriter who has written movies like The African Queen and The Sun Also Rises. Then she met Prince Aly Khan, and gave up her modeling career overnight. She lived with him and later became his fiancée. During her career, Bettina has appeared in almost all fashion magazines, on covers of some of them, including Elle français, L'Officiel de la mode, de l'Album du Figaro, Vogue français and American Vogue, with the only exception of Harper's Bazaar, the biggest rival of Vogue. As a model, She worked with all the greatest fashion photographers at the time such as Henry Clarke, Horst P. Horst, Erwin Blumenfeld, Norman Parkinson, Irving Penn, Georges Dambier, Mark Shaw, Willy Maywald, Jean-Philippe Charbonnier and Gordon Parks. In one of the photo sessions, she was photoed with Pablo Picasso wearing a blouse decorated by the artist. In 1960, Bettina was traveling with Aly Khan when they suffered a car accident that took the life of the prince, Bettina survived but lost their child she was carrying. After Aly Khan´s death, Bettina lived quieter life, she took some acting jobs, worked in public relations for some fashion houses like Valentino, and wrote poetry in her spare times, and wrote an autobiography, Bettina par Bettina in 1964. Then in 1969, Coco Channel asked her to model for her new collection, and later she became attachée de presse of French desinger Emmanuel Ungaro in U.S. In 1972, French writer Françoise Sagan wrote an article, L'éminence rousse for Vogue Paris, paying Bettina, paying her the ultimate tribute. In 2010, Bettina Graziani was awarded Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres by French government. In her later years, Bettina was closest to Franco-Tunisian designer Azzedine Alaïa who dressed her regularly, and to whose foundation she donnated her photograph collection. In 2015, Bettina died in Paris at 89. |
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