NETTIE ROSENSTEIN
When asked to give three characteristics of a good designer, our current featured designer replied, “Imagination, good taste, and an unfaltering capacity for work, work with a capital W!” She knew about those characteristics first hand because she herself was called one of the first ladies of American couture. Nettie Rosenstein set American design standards as high as those of her European counterparts and understood what it took to be at the top of her field. Contemporary designers including Judith Lieberman, Jackie Rogers, and Hawaii’s Mamo Howell, all began under her tutorage.
Austrian born, Nettie Rosencrans immigrated to the US with her family when she was a small child and began sewing at the age of 11. She came from a fashion savvy family and her older sister, Pauline, was considered to be one of the best milliners in New York. She never had formal sewing lesson and learned most of what she knew from trial and error. After her 1916 marriage to Saul Rosenstein, she started her own business in the ground floor brownstone flat in Harlem. Pauline would send her hat customers to Nettie if they needed custom made garments. So many people were coming and going from the small flat, that the police came to investigate, but once they saw the bolts of fabric, they knew she was indeed a legitimate seamstress.
In the mid twenties, Nettie’s brother married her good friend, Eva Greene. Eva was a skilled seamstress and she joined Nettie in a new fashion venture. Nettie, being somewhat hyperactive and nervous, from that time on never touched a needle and handled the fabric only to drape it on the mannequins and models. Both Nettie and Eva, however, were very familiar with the fashion houses of Vionnet, Chanel, Gres, Molyneux, Mainbocher, etc.. and were frequent visitors to the couturiers.
Nettie and Eva’s fates were sealed during the flapper era, when a loyal customer brought Joseph Magnin, of I Magnin to the shop. He bought whatever they could produce and customers snatched up the pieces as soon as they were put on display. A few years later, they added a third partner, Charles Gomprecht, a businessman well experienced in the garment industry, and opened their shop on West 47th Street in 1931. They produced around 5-6 hundred pieces a year and only sold to one store in each major city. Her dresses were sold for $500 at the time and were considered to be the ultimate luxury. She made the gowns that Mamie Eisenhower wore to the Presidential inaugural balls both times her husband was elected, designed for Norma Shearer, Dinah Shore, and other celebrities, and received the Coty award in 1947.
Known as a true perfectionist, Nettie spent hours finalizing details of garments before allowing them to be put into production. Mollie Parnis once said that she was in Paris and went to a hairdresser, Guillaume, and heard a woman in the next booth complaining, “you cut my hair off grain.” Asking who the woman was, she was told it was Nettie Rosenstein.
Nettie Rosenstein’s name is synonymous with the term “the little black dress” and she is credited with the introduction of the idea that simplicity is an art form of its own. She even created her accessories line of handbags and jewelry to compliment the simple elegance of her designs. But it wasn’t just simplicity, it was fit that made Nettie Rosenstein’s designs so coveted. She understood a woman’s body and draped the body with unprecedented expertise. A reporter covering her 1944 show at the Copely Plaza remarked, “I should like to record my deep amazement at Rosenstein’s ‘black magic.‘ What she can do with black fabrics in street clothes, afternoon, dinner and evening dresses is something to make a man gasp.“
I personally have never understood why she hasn’t been given the modern day recognition on a broader scale from vintage clothing collectors that she deserves. I actually mourned a lucrative sale at a show recently, when a customer purchased one of her gowns. It was a lavender raw silk strapless gown with a gathered drop waist and full skirt. I felt like a masterpiece was leaving my very humble museum. I also admire her humility as a designer. She is known to have said that it wasn’t necessary for the designers to get attention or be talked about, that it is the clothes themselves that should be the main focal points. Maybe it is ironically her humility itself that has kept her in the shadows of lesser designers. But once you have held a Nettie Rosenstein gown and if you are even luckier enough to own one, you will need no further explanation as to why they are so special.
When Nettie Rosenstein died at the age of 90 in 1980, her daughter Claire was asked for what she would most want her mother to be remembered, she replied with her mother’s famous quote: “It’s what you leave off of a dress that makes it smart”.
Sources:
New York Times
Virginia Pope October 30, 1942
Virginia Pope February 27, 1951
Leonard Sloane February 10, 1965
Bernadine Morris March 15, 1980
The Long Story Short
With Leslie Wilcox November 6, 2007
Christian Science Monitor (1908-Current file); Oct 5, 1940
By Barbara E. Scott Fisher Written for The Christian Science Monitor
Photo Credits:
Yeshiva University Museum.
Gift of Sandy Schreier
Evening Dress, Nettie Rosenstein, ca. 1936
http://www.yumuseum.org/
APerfectFit/about.htm
http://www.chron.com/content/
interactive/special/smithsonian/
photos/mamie.html
Mamie Eisenhower gown