Cold War Consumer “Freedom”: Dorothy Shaver and American Fashion

While historians in have studied Cold War consumerism, one area that has received less attention is fashion. Yet, fashion played an important, and overlooked, role in Cold War culture. A key figure in the American fashion industry from the 1930s through her death in 1959 was Dorothy Shaver, the president of Lord & Taylor department store in New York City. Shaver was a well-known and tireless advocate for homegrown American fashion, distinct from Paris. Inspired by the simple lines of modernism, designers like Claire McCardell created the “American Look,” which Lord & Taylor heavily promoted at the end of World War II. Shaver thus envisioned international “style leadership,” as well as geopolitical dominance for the postwar U.S. With the outbreak of the Cold War, Shaver saw the larger political import of American fashion on the world stage. She argued that American fashion - which offered modern, well-made, and well-priced clothes to women consumers - embodied nothing less than American freedom, in stark contrast communism. American fashions, Shaver believed, allowed American women to achieve the very classlessness that communists desired and to quite literally wear their freedom. Yet Shaver also saw that American fashion and design could have political significance in other aspects of Cold War culture. In the McCarthy era of the early 1950s that pitted uniformity and conformity against creativity and free-thinking both at home and abroad, Dorothy Shaver publically came out in support of creativity. Although modern art was still controversial among some quarters of American society in the early 1950s, Dorothy Shaver strongly supported it and saw creativity as the essential engine of American capitalism. She was unafraid to stand against conformist thinking, and gave a much-lauded speech on the topic to the Brotherhood of Christians and Jews in 1954 at the height of the Army-McCarthy trial.