Sewing With Nancy

Today's Nancy's Corner guest showcases the legacy and life of fashion designer in Prague who along with her husband tried to escape the onslaught of Nazi Germany in 1939. Their efforts failed. But their memory lives on in a letter fashion sketches and a museum exhibit that honors the stitching history from the Holocaust. Please welcome Ellie Gettinger from the Jewish Museum in Milwaukee. She joins us today via Skype. Good to see you, Ellie. Thanks for having me. To tell the story, we have to start at the beginning as we know it today. It started with a letter. We received, in 1997, a letter eight dress designs two envelopes, and one photograph that were sent from Czechoslovakia in 1939. They were sent from a man named Paul Strnad. And in it, in very quiet terms he says, thank you so much for troubling to get an affidavit of necessity for my wife as a dress designer and that they've lost their jobs. But it doesn't really specify what's going on with them aside from the fact that they've lost their jobs. This letter is dated December 1939. But we know World War II has started and we can see from the outside of the envelope that this was sent it says approved by the Air Force. Through this letter, he's trying to get Visas. And by separate cover, they send eight of her dress designs. This became part of our permanent collection here and we open an exhibit this fall in which we look at, we had these dresses created and used that as a way of kind of exploring the loss of the Holocaust because despite Paul's best efforts and despite his cousin Alvin's best efforts so they both died in the Holocaust. This story gives chills to me. And especially seeing-- hearing the story is sad but seeing the legacy of Hedy Hedwig her fashion designs. Here's an illustration of a gown. Very luxurious. Doesn't it seem like you could see this in a Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire movie? Yes! Or in the scene-scape at Casa Blanca at Rick's Caf Amricain? That's what I get from looking at these drawings. I feel like they're so of their time but at the same time a lot of them are timeless in this way that you know, that's the gown that I think we could see at the Oscars and no one would flinch and say, "Oh, how gauche." The Milwaukee Repertory Theater took it upon themselves to make patterns from these sketches and then make the garments. Explain a little bit about that. Well, their process was extensive. I don't think any of us here at the museum fully appreciated what we were asking them to do. Nothing on the garments had anything about what sorts of fabrics you would be utilizing. There was nothing that said, you know these are the seam allowances that you might need; this is how, you know-- And even harder, there was nothing that said what the backs of these dresses should look like. You know, that would be a challenge. There's an interpretation there. Exactly, so what they did is they pulled things from their archive. They went to Mount Mary, which is University in Milwaukee that has a fabulous costume archive and they pulled things that were related from their archive. They went to vintage patterns on the Internet and all sorts of different resources to try and develop a kind of look book of styles that were similar to the styles that were sent. So, for that gown, for example they had seven or eight different dresses that they could go off of and say, well, in this time period if you're doing that kind of-- if you want that kind of volume on the bottom these are some mechanisms by which people are doing that. You know, it's an amazing work of research. I don't think any of us fully appreciated like what we were saying that they needed to do. What an amazing thing to happen with the making. The project lead for us was Jessica Jaeger. Jessica is in the costume shop there and has all of that background but she also is a USO reenactor and creates all of her costumes for that. So she knows this period backward and forward. You know, she knows exactly what these details would be so she applied that very, very keen eye into creating these costumes, they're not costumes, they're clothing that I think is apparent. We'll just quickly look at some of the other designs. In closing, we have coats and hats it's just amazing, the detail. Yeah, each of them, there's six hats and the milliner that created each one of them the blue one that you see there is actually like a second work. She went back and reevaluated how that would've looked. The felt was dyed to match. The coats have all of these unbelievable vintage details. For instance, the fur cuffs on the blue coat is actually vintage fur from that time period, coyote because that was the sort of fur that would've been used in Czechoslovakia. It's just unbelievable. Well, what a great way to honor a legacy and to honor Hedy and tell a story. This exhibit will travel, and perhaps some of our viewers will see it in different cities. We would love that. Thanks for joining me, Ellie, I appreciate it. And thank you for watching Sewing with Nancy. You can watch this program again and other programs online at nancyzieman.com. Thanks for joining us. Bye for now.