Fashion and illustration are inherently collaborative undertakings that bridge art and industry. To build a successful label, fashion designers must keep buyers, suppliers, and retailers in mind—creating clothing that fits, flatters, and appeals to the taste and budget of a specific clientele. Similarly, illustrators must consider where their work is appearing, what story it’s telling, or which object it’s selling.
When illustrator Joseph Bolegard delineated these chic women, he gave them bobbed hair, rouged cheeks, headbands, and dropped-waist dresses, capturing the emerging flapper style of the Jazz Age. His figures are slim and flat-chested, and his fabric appears luxurious, with embroidered details and metallic accessories. Bolegard may not have been tasked with depicting specific dresses. The covers for Fashions of the Hour—a promotional magazine produced by the Chicago department store Marshall Field’s—seem more aspirational than practical. However, Bolegard was certainly collaborating with the magazine’s art director Clara Wilson, a published illustrator who was responsible for merchandising inside the store as well as the contents of Fashions of the Hour.
To build a career in fashion, a generation later, designer Zelda Wynn Valdes created memorable dresses for celebrities like Josephine Baker, Ella Fitzgerald, and Mae West. She designed stage costumes for singers and dancers, and her sensitivity to her clients’ needs extended to dyeing dancers’ tights and shoes to match their skin tones. She opened the first Black-owned business on Broadway in New York City, and her success opened doors for other women and African American designers. A new children’s book, Dazzling Zelda: The Story of Fashion Designer Zelda Wynn Valdes, presents her story as interpreted by Aura Lewis in collaboration with Farai Simoyi. Lewis’s illustrations show a love of modern patterns and striking color juxtapositions shared by Jazz Age designers and illustrators.
I hope you can join me on January 16 for an evening of Illustrious Fashion, including an in-gallery conversation about Jazz Age fashion with Farai Simoyi.
Heather Campbell Coyle
Curator of American Art
Learn more about Clara Wilson and Fashions of the Hour here.
Image: Springtime, from Marshall Field Fashions of the Hour, Spring 1922. Joseph Bolegard (1889–1963). Watercolor, ink, and gouache on board, 15 1/2 x 13 inches. Delaware Art Museum, Purchased with funds donated by Valerie Ann Leeds and Acquisition Fund, 2024.