Photography by George McCue, George McCue Collection, the State Historical Society of Missouri
We started with beaver furs and rough tunics, then made jeans, overalls, and enough shoes to cobble the country. Soon, St. Louis had a huge garment district and twice as many dry-goods companies as Chicago, almost as many as New York.
It was time for a little frippery.
In 1903, Rice-Stix—sutlers who had sold provisions to Army soldiers, then come here to escape Memphis’ yellow fever—added a delicate line of skirts and petticoats. The St. Louis Corset Company cranked out the obligatory armor, Levis-Zukowski Mercantile Co. became the largest millinery house in the nation, and S. Grobinsky tiptoed into the brave new world of women’s underwear. By the 1920s, the garment district, with its Italianate redbrick factories and warehouses ornamented with terra-cotta lions, covered 15 blocks. People flowed into St. Louis twice a year to attend important fashion shows, and you could stand on Washington Avenue and hear the ear-tingling zzzzzz of thousands of sewing machines running up seams of women’s dresses.
The only problem was, those seams were so…generous.
In the Victorian era, slender teenagers plumped right up when they reached womanhood. The Brits were being sympathetic when they nicknamed those awkward teens “flappers.” But in the ’20s, the flat-chested, slender-hipped body of a young girl took on sleek glamour. Fashion illustrators drew women narrow, with long limbs and sharply pointed chins and Russian wolfhounds by their side. The ideal figure shrank, and its possessors swam in the matronly fashions still being mass-produced. Flapper dresses solved the problem temporarily—but what next?
In 1929, Irving Sorger, a merchandising manager for Kline’s in St. Louis, went looking for youthful styles and couldn’t find any. Even the clothing’s measurements seemed wrong to him. So Kline’s came up with its own “ideal girl” standard measurements, the “bust pocket” higher, the waist shorter, the waistline smaller. And because college girls were the most “fashion-original,” Sorger went to Washington University’s fashion-design students for ideas.
An informal collaboration emerged between the garment district’s dress companies and Wash. U.’s design faculty and students, with Sorger pushing the new junior size like a carnival barker. “Let’s give young America the clothes it wants,” he cried in 1934.
Over the course of the next five years, the number of garment workers in St. Louis went from 1,200 to 6,000. In 1938, a headline in Retailers Market News announced, “St. Louis Becomes Leading Junior Manufacturer in Country.” Between 1934 and 1949, the number of women’s clothing manufacturers in St. Louis tripled, and total sales volume went from $20 million to more than $85 million.
Here, we have to interrupt the legend: Others were already reinventing junior sizes for adult women. When Jaime Mestres did a master’s thesis on the development of the junior-size industry, she found arguments raging across the U.S. in the late ’20s about the proper measurements of junior sizes. Juniors could work for older women, too, the industry decided—as long as they were young at heart. As early as 1929, a Hahne & Company ad said, “Being your age is out—it’s being your size that counts” and quoted someone “past the age of indiscretion” exclaiming, “Whoopee…! I’m a Junior Miss!”
Once the die was cast, though, St. Louis took the lead. Through the ’30s and ’40s, St. Louis had one of the largest needle-trade centers in the country—second, many said, only to New York—and was the center of manufacture for junior-size dresses. On January 20, 1940, Retailers Market News quoted San Antonio fashion buyer A. Levy thanking St. Louis manufacturers:
“St. Louis was first to develop the junior idea in dresses. This has meant an increase in the dress business of every store in America.” A headline that June blared “Factories Needed.” Women were now spending an average of $55 on clothing every year, and St. Louis was supplying rather a lot of them.
“Some of our best customers actually walk out without buying when they can’t get St. Louis originals,” Jeannette Abelow, a buyer in Brooklyn, told Retailers Market News that July. And in 1942, LIFE magazine wrote that St. Louis gave “young U.S. girls just the kind of dress they wanted.”
Rags to Riches
In 1939, Sam Chaleff—short, stocky, smart, and a workaholic, the ambitious son of a Russian Jewish tailor—started a dress-manufacturing company called Toby Lane. He had married late because of the Depression; now, he and his wife rented half a hallway, and she ran the office while he made all of the sales calls. Toby Lane’s junior dresses soon hung alongside a Caron Lane label for standard, missy sizes and Lady Caron for “half-sizes,” that era’s odd euphemism for bigger. Chaleff rented four floors at 1111 Washington and walked through aisles of zinging sewing machines, puffing on an inevitable cigar and spitting out orders with the smoke.
Many of Chaleff’s friendly rivals on Washington Avenue were also Jewish: “It was probably one of the only openings for them,” his daughter later realized. “Jews weren’t allowed into a lot of businesses.”
Junior-size dress manufacturers lined his block: Doris Dodson at 1120 Washington, Dolly Dimple at 1134, Mary Muffet and Kerry Cricket at 1136. To the east stood 1015 Washington, where the head of Wash. U.’s design department, Bessie Recht, sketched some of the first junior dresses for Dorsa Dresses. In 1946, the seven-story building (now the Dorsa Lofts) was given a Moderne green-tiled entrance with a jazzy red neon sign; inside was a salon and stage for fashion shows and a little meeting room, complete with a wet bar, where garment-district execs and realtors from Chestnut Street came up with a plan to open Meadowbrook Country Club, which would welcome Jewish families.
Gale-Rosenbaum moved into the building in the early 1940s, just as Washington Avenue hit its peak. Fabric was rationed just like gasoline, meat, and sugar, because the fabric mills were conscripted to make uniforms and tents for World War II. “The little merchant could never get as much as he wanted of anything,” recalls Bud Rosenbaum, the co-founder’s son.
He chuckles, remembering the building’s central switchboard: “Jessie, our telephone operator, would plug in the call and use a toggle switch to make that person’s phone ring. If she was busy, the rings were real short. If she was angry at you, she’d keep her finger on that switch until you picked up. Jessie was the queen of 1015 Washington.”
Gale-Rosenbaum made sleepwear, dusters (the housecoats that sweatpants replaced), and lingerie. “When you wore a dress, you had to wear a slip,” Rosenbaum explains. “A cotton slip could only survive 15 or 20 washings—this was before synthetics. Then, after World War II, nylons and Dacrons lasted forever, and women started wearing pants, so we transitioned into ladies’ sportswear.”
At its peak, Gale-Rosenbaum employed 400 and had a full design department: three designers and a Wash. U. intern, a seamstress for each designer, and a cutter. Sixteen traveling salesmen drummed up business, venturing as far west as Colorado. When all of the seamstresses went off to be Rosie the Riveters, Morris Rosenbaum’s factory became the first on the avenue to employ African-Americans. “They were not accepted easily,” Bud says, his voice losing its vim. “That’s why we had to have two factories, separated by a floor. But they were all members of the union.”
The garment district’s factories all paid piece-rate, so women kept their heads bent, their foot on the pedal. One might do nothing but run the button machine, another stitch pockets all day, stopping only to gulp a sandwich or hurry down the hall to the lavatory, its sink a long trough with multiple faucets. In 1933, about 2,000 women walked out of 48 shops, striking in order to force employers to accept the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union. Years later, one of the seamstresses, Bertha Lichtenburg, would see an old photo and recognize a scab: “Six of us would get around her, and she wouldn’t go nowhere with us pushing her,” Lichtenburg told historian Katharine Corbett. “And we’d get [her] around the corner of the building, and we’d get her up against the wall and tell her she should join the union!”
A Change of Clothes
Norman Litz’s father oversaw the manufacture of New York’s couture in the 1920s, then came to St. Louis to oversee dress manufacturing for Rice-Stix. During World War II, he realized that Washington Avenue had almost everything—factories making only the little fabric-covered belts for the dresses, factories embroidering cotton for the larger manufacturers. But there was nobody making shoulder pads. “Sophie,” he told his wife, “I have a job for you.” He inked the documents incorporating Bennat Shoulder Pads Company, then immediately put her in charge.
Bubbly and go-get-’em, Sophie Litz was the only woman CEO in the garment district. She had what the guys might have called gumption—meaning she took no crap from them. “She sold everybody in the Midwest,” her son says proudly.
He got her genes.
“You had to work one or two seasons in advance, figure out the trends,” Norman says. Once a design was approved, it was made up by hand in a perfect size 8, and salesmen were sent out on the road with 50 samples, safety-pinned with swatches of the other colors available. “We had dozens of salesmen running around and sending in orders, and the little girls in the office would sit down and put the orders on summary sheets. We had these large cardboard cards, and we wrote the orders on them in detail, what size and colors that store wanted. Then the managers would try to interpret what they meant for the coming season. The earlier you did that, the quicker you could order your fabric and finishes, and the quicker you were in stores.”
The son of a dress manufacturer and a shoulder-pad manufacturer, Norman married Vicki Chaleff, daughter of the Toby Lane founder. Vicki grew up a tomboy in self-defense, but her girly sister, Arlen Chaleff, begged her father to make dresses for her Washington University sorority: white shirtwaists with the Alpha Epsilon Phi sorority logo in dark green. Arlen even tried her hand at designing: a skirt and short jacket, à la Chanel. She idolized one of Toby Lane’s designers, an artsy young woman named Elizabeth Burner.
Sam Chaleff hired Burner in 1950, the minute that she graduated from Wash. U. She’d just won a prize in its big fashion show for a white cotton gabardine strapless evening dress with a brown plaid top and a sequined, detachable apron that could be worn as a cape. Now, she had to learn to design on a budget. She could use linen, cotton, rayon, and wool blends, but not pure wool—too expensive—and she could only use certain buttons and laces and rickrack.
Every morning, she’d stop for coffee and a Danish at Miss Hulling’s, then take the rickety elevator halfway up 1111 Washington to her long, narrow workroom, one floor below the factory. She’d greet her sample maker, who drove a little Model T in from Kimmswick. And then she’d start sketching new looks for the next season.
Burner loved going to New York to buy fabric for Toby Lane, loved getting picked up in a limo for dinner with people from Crown Fabrics or M. Lowenstein & Sons or Dan River Fabrics or Burlington. But when one of Toby Lane’s salesmen introduced her to a bachelor named Aaron Landau, her world settled fast. They married; Aaron bought an interest in Toby Lane and became vice president of sales; Liz quit in 1961 to start their family.
All Zipped Up
By the time Liz Landau quit Toby Lane, women were starting to wear pants, and dress manufacturers were scrambling to switch to sportswear. Norman Litz set up five factories in Illinois, cutting and sewing for sportswear makers with more demand than production capacity.
He saw more changes coming, though. In 1969, he quit and went into plastics.
Around the same time, Sam Chaleff sold his business for a song.
Bud Rosenbaum held on until 1979. By then, he says, the annual banquet of the Associated Garment Industries of St. Louis, which used to fill the ballroom of the Hotel Jefferson, “could have been held in a telephone booth.”
What ended the era? Rosenbaum rattles off factors.
• We were a union city—so when the South built itself a nonunion manufacturing base, we couldn’t compete.
• Manufacturing moved to small towns.
• Small-town retail went away, because the merchants’ kids went off to college and didn’t want to come back and run Dad’s old store.
• Discount stores invaded. “A little outfit called Walmart,” says Rosenbaum, and he’s not being sarcastic; the Bentonville, Ark., chain carried no clout in those days.
• Interstates let small-town buyers drive to the big city often and easily, to spend the day shopping.
• Foreign imports tumbled in, so cheap they arrived in bales instead of boxes.
Litz also blames the computer. Before its lightning calculus, “orders had to be collated by hand,” guessing at demand and then charting every line’s quantities in various colors and sizes. Computers managed all that with a formula. “New York started doing projects that way and just stole everything,” Litz grumbles. “St. Louis was still working on the old system. The large manufacturers in town had no one to adapt to the new computer models, no one beneath the guys who were running them in the ’40s. A lot of them never even converted from the very old sewing machines to the new, fast ones.
“Now, garments are made overseas,” he adds, “because it’s so easy to control the people overseas, and the freight is minimal. It’s something we didn’t even think was possible in the ’50s. If somebody was going to have something made in China, you’d think they were nuts: ‘You’ll never get it back!’ Now people are flying over every Monday. And there’s nobody here who still knows how to sew.
“I lived through a whole era of up and down.”
