Fashion Designer's Archives Find Home at UCLA Library
Designer Bonnie Cashin grew up working at her mother’s custom dressmaking shops in San Francisco and Los Angeles. By the time she was a young woman, she was off to New York to design costumes for the chorus line at the Roxy Theatre.
She became known as one of the mothers of American sportswear after her simple and casual loose-fitting designs made their way into the collection of New York sportswear company Adler & Adler and then Philip Sills.
Cashin’s designs are returning to Los Angeles. The University of California, Los Angeles library has acquired the archives of the fashion designer, who passed away in 2000 in New York at the age of 84. The archives contain complete documentation of her fashion and costume designs, including sketches, photographs and slides. They also contain her notebooks, sketchbooks, travel books and idea books; audio- and videotapes of her interviews; and business correspondence, contracts and other documents.
“We are deeply honored that the trustees of Bonnie Cashin’s estate have entrusted her archive to the UCLA library,” said Head Librarian Gary E. Strong. “With the addition of these remarkable materials to our existing holdings, researchers will now have access to an extraordinary range of materials in the area of mid-century modernism.”
The donation comes with a $1.5 million gift from the Bonnie Cashin estate to support the archives and endow the Bonnie Cashin Endowed Lecture Series, which will showcase designers in all fields who push the boundaries of creativity.
Cashin designed military uniforms during World War II but returned to Hollywood in 1943 to design costumes for more than 30 major Twentieth Century-Fox films, including “Anna and the King of Siam,” “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” and “Laura.”
At the end of the 1940s, Cashin returned to New York to develop her simple, casual designs for Adler & Adler and then for manufacturer Philip Sills. She was renowned for developing the layered look, which has been popular ever since. Her designs were sold at Nordstrom, I. Magnin and other high-end stores.
In the 1960s, she designed Coach leatherwear company’s first line of handbags, called “Cashin Carry.” Inspired by the hardware on the convertible top of her sports car, she created the brass toggle that became Coach’s hallmark and revolutionized the handbag industry with designs that could be folded flat and that employed shoulder straps, in contrast to rigid, hand-held designs.
She was inducted into the Coty American Fashion Critics Hall of Fame in 1972.
UCLA will house the Bonnie Cashin archives in the Charles E. Young Research Library Department of Special Collections. An exhibition, “Chic Is Where You Find It: Selections From the Bonnie Cashin Collection of Theater, Film and Fashion Design,” will be on view in the department through March 25. —Deborah Belgum
