Courtesy of Missouri History Museum, St. Louis
Hadley Technical School Fur Class, circa 1930
Valerie Kienzle’s interest in fashion started with shoes. Members of her husband’s family, including his grandfather and great-great-great-grandfather, worked for the International Shoe Company, founded in St. Louis in 1921 and headquartered inside today’s City Museum building.
Kienzle, a Nashville native turned local historian, has written five books about St. Louis and Missouri history. Wanting to learn more about the history of fashion in St. Louis, she started searching through photo archives at the Missouri History Museum and Landmarks Association of St. Louis—and realized that she didn’t want to stop. “I was like a kid going down rabbit holes. It was all so fascinating,” she recalls.
But it wasn’t until after she visited the shoe and clothing archives at the Missouri History Museum that she decided to write a book. She contacted publisher Josh Stevens at Reedy Press to gauge his interest. “We have a robust fashion history that people are only vaguely aware of and that I hadn’t really seen covered,” Stevens says.
Kienzle spent five years researching. She examined early photographs on glass panes, vintage advertisements, and colorful posters at the Missouri History Museum, the State Historical Society of Missouri, and the Library of Congress. “I’d talk to people in the area whose parents or grandparents had been involved in one of the two industries [shoe and clothing],” she says.
The resulting book, Ready to Wear, will be published June 1. It begins in 1764, the year Pierre Laclède and Auguste Chouteau founded St. Louis as a fur trading post. In the city’s fur-trading heyday, millions of furs—mink, mole, squirrel, badger, marmot, muskrat, rabbit, possum, skunk, and housecat—were stored in several blocks’ worth of warehouses downtown, waiting to be shipped around the world. “All I can think of is how bad these places must have smelled,” Kienzle says.
Courtesy of STL Media History Association
Over the many years, St. Louis has been home to notable contributors to fashion. Elizabeth Keckley, born into slavery in Virginia, purchased her freedom and her son’s from her half-sister, who was also her enslaver, using the money that she earned as a seamstress in St. Louis. Keckley would go on to work as Mary Todd Lincoln’s personal seamstress during her years as first lady of the United States. Irving Sorger, originally from Austria but working in St. Louis, began designing clothes specifically for young women when he noticed the fashion-forward style of garments made and worn by female students in the fine arts department at Washington University. “In the 1930s, there was really no differentiation between what matronly mothers and grandmothers wore and what younger girls wore,” says Kienzle. Sorger changed that, she says: “He saw some of the [students’] designs and was, like, ‘Oh my gosh, this is fabulous.’”
Two St. Louis–based companies, Co-ed Frocks and Brown Shoe Company, made the uniforms for the Girl Scouts of America. During World Wars I and II, Brown Shoe Company, International Shoe Company, and Hamilton-Brown Shoe Company supplied millions of pairs of boots to the four branches of the U.S. military.
Today, St. Louis’ fashion scene continues to play an important role in civic life. “There are more companies and people making one-of-a-kind jewelry and clothing designs here than people realize,” says Kienzle, noting the work of the Saint Louis Fashion Fund as the locus of a resurgence of people, ideas, and creativity in fashion.
Ready to Wear will be available for purchase June 1 at Left Bank Books and The Novel Neighbor.
