^{Long before “American fashion” had a clear identity of its own, one particular female fashion designer was already trying to define what it could be.}

^{For much of Jessie Franklin Turner's career, American fashion lived in Paris's shadow (under Paris’s thumb, more like). French couture houses set the pace and American designers and department store buyers flung themselves about, trying to keep up. They sailed off to Paris to study the latest collections, then they would purchase the garments, bring back samples, sketch the details, or simply examine how a dress was constructed, after which the department stores would produce their own versions for the American market.}

^{Designers such as Paul Poiret, Jeanne Lanvin, and later Coco Chanel had enormous influence on what American women wore. Original French designs were reproduced and sold in America long before the idea of an independent American fashion identity had fully taken hold.}

^{Born in St. Louis in 1881 and raised in Peoria, Illinois, Turner came to fashion through art, textiles, and retail rather than through the traditional Parisian route. She studied painting and sculpture as a young woman and began working in a lingerie shop as a teenager. What started as a job quickly became a career. She moved into buying, traveled to Europe and the Philippines, and developed an unusually sharp eye for fabric, craftsmanship, and detail.}

^{By the 1910s, Turner was working with Bonwit Teller in New York. She eventually began designing for the store under the name Winifred Warren, creating lingerie and tea gowns that were exhibited at the American Museum of Natural History in 1919.}

^{But Turner wanted more freedom than a department store could give her. In 1923, she opened her own shop on Park Avenue and began making clothes entirely on her own terms. She draped fabric directly onto the body, allowing the shape of the garment to emerge as she worked. Her dresses were fluid, often dramatic, and rarely looked like anything else being sold in New York.}

^{Turner drew ideas from places and periods far beyond contemporary fashion. Historical textiles, museum collections, and traditional garments found their way into her work. An Ainu coat, for example, became the starting point for one of her dresses. She wasn't simply borrowing old designs; she was translating what she saw into something distinctly her own.}

^{Her independence made Turner unusual. At a time when American designers were often judged by how closely they could reproduce Paris fashion, she was building a different kind of reputation. Paul Poiret reportedly called her the only American designer of genius. Elizabeth Hawes later remembered Turner as one of the few American dressmakers producing truly original couture.}

^{Her clothes attracted women who matched her own singular taste, women who wanted something less predictable, including textile designer Dorothy Liebes and the famously unconventional Millicent Rogers. Turner herself was somewhat elusive, reportedly rarely meeting with her clients.}

^{She retired in 1943, leaving behind a body of work that helped prove American fashion did not have to look to Paris for permission to be original. Today, her designs remain in collections at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Rhode Island School of Design Museum.}

^{Turner's importance isn't simply that she was an early American designer. It is that she trusted her own eye at a time when doing so was not yet the obvious choice.}

^{A Pair of Silk Stockings by Kate Chopin}

^{(You can read the whole story in the original Vogue edition.)}

^{So begins A Pair of Silk Stockings (1897), a short story by American author Kate Chopin.}

^{From the description of our protagonist’s coin purse, we can guess that the extra $15 Mrs. Sommers suddenly receives is probably much-needed.}

^{Fifteen dollars. In 1897, this amounted to roughly $585 in today’s buying power. Nice.}

^{So, what’s a girl to do?}

^{Of course, the comfort and care of her children is foremost in Mrs. Sommers’ mind.}

^{“She had no time…The needs of the present absorbed her every faculty…}

^{She had swallowed a light luncheon—no! when she came to think of it, between getting the children fed and the place righted, and preparing herself for the shopping bout, she had actually forgotten to eat any luncheon at all!”}

^{Later, however, while sitting to rest at a hosiery counter inside a department store, Mrs. Sommers}

^Uh-oh.

^{Though department stores aren’t super relevant today, in her book Empresses of Seventh Avenue (2024), Nancy MacDonell writes of their previous novelty and importance, citing a book by French writer, Émile Zola:}

^{Elsewhere, MacDonell writes: Unlike cramped, old-fashioned shops they replaced, department stores were often the largest and most impressive buildings in town, with soaring ceilings and opulent decor…}

^{Aptly, Chopin’s story was first published in the glamorous pages of Vogue and goes on to detail little Mrs. Sommers’ shopping spree.}

^{“Not thinking at all,” Mrs. Sommers disregards her plans to buy clothes for her children and instead spends her money and the afternoon on herself. She purchases boots to go with her silk stockings, buys fitted kid gloves and expensive magazines, lunches at a high-class restaurant, and ends her day sharing chocolates with a fellow theatergoer.}

^{To women who had more than enough money, purchasing silk stockings would’ve perhaps been the most mundane part of their day.}

^{We’re often presented with the tension between Mrs. Sommers’ usual bargaining instincts and the intoxicating, foreign allure of luxury, from what she puts on to what she puts in her mouth.}

^{“She was very hungry. Another time she would have stilled the cravings for food until reaching her own home, where she would have brewed herself a cup of tea and taken a snack of anything that was available. But the impulse that was guiding her would not suffer her to entertain any such thought. There was a restaurant at the corner. She had never entered its doors; from the outside she had sometimes caught glimpses of spotless damask and shining crystal, and soft-stepping waiters serving people of fashion.}

^{When she entered, her appearance created no surprise, no consternation, as she had half feared it might. She seated herself at a small table alone, and an attentive waiter at once approached to take her order.”}

^{Does Mrs. Sommers feel guilty for all her spending in the end?}

^{Well, the story finishes like this:}

^{“The play was over, the music ceased, the crowd filed out. It was like a dream ended. People scattered in all directions. Mrs. Sommers went to the corner and waited for the cable car. A man with keen eyes, who sat opposite to her, seemed to like the study of her small, pale face. It puzzled him to decipher what he saw there. In truth, he saw nothing—unless he were wizard enough to detect a poignant wish, a powerful longing that the cable car would never stop anywhere, but go on and on with her forever.”}

^{Up until it wraps up, much of the story can feel lighthearted for the fact that we’re essentially following along as Mrs. Sommers makes one indulgent purchase after another, and we’ve all been there before.}

^{I shouldn’t, but I do. Oh, I should avoid doing this...but I don’t.}

^{Silk stockings are Mrs. Sommers’ first little piece of luxury…the gateway drug, so to speak: “What a very small parcel it was! It seemed lost in the depths of her shabby old shopping-bag.”; next are the more expensive boots and gloves; following this are the magazines; and afterward, the fancy lunch she could have skipped, and a show to top it off—they all work to demonstrate the breakdown of Mrs. Sommers’ self-control and sense of responsibility, espeically when, at the beginning of the story:}

^{At the end, her desire for the trolley car to go on and on could be interpreted as a sign of guilt and regret…the low after the high…having to go home and face her family after a day of selfish spending. Even if she never tells her husband and children about the fifteen dollars, this may not negate her feeling of guilt.}

^{Yet, there’s also a sense that the story has been less a teasing portrayal of an irresponsible wife and mother or just a lesson on the emptiness of consumerism and the fleeting happiness it brings her.}

^{It also emerges as a critique of how domestic responsibilities and self-sacrifice fall heaviest on her shoulders.}

^{Dissatisfaction mounts until she can’t suppress her desires anymore.}

^{Mrs. Sommers’ small act of rebellion costs her $15. It buys her a quick fling with self-indulgence.}

^{Though it leaves us wondering if her regret at the end has more to do with the spending spree itself or with the idea that—perhaps until all the kids are grown up?—it’s the only escape from constant selflessness that she’ll get.}