Part IThe Story
Only the Coats Were Worth a Damn
She fell asleep at Lanvin. The New Yorker, writing in the spring of 1934, dated the episode to "two years ago," which puts it in one of the Paris seasons of 1932. Lanvin's house mannequins were swaying past in the new dresses, and the woman in the good chair, exquisitely dressed and worn out by the openings, leaned back and dozed "like a fox." She was four feet ten inches tall. She had red-gold hair arranged that season in a tier of ringlets that curled up over one ear, and she was known to twirl them absently with her fingers. Around her sat the American buyers and fashion press, the people whose job it was to watch Paris on behalf of department stores in Chicago and Dallas and Los Angeles. Many of them were watching her.
When the coats came out she sat up, put on a pair of horn-rimmed glasses, and studied every coat Lanvin showed. Then the champagne arrived, which meant the showing was over. She took off the spectacles, turned to a friend, and asked, "Will you bend an elbow with me?" The buyers and press, the magazine reported, "charged out to cable their American employers that only coats were worth a damn at Lanvin's that season."
Her whole career is in that scene. She could not sew a fine seam, and she never learned to. She could not draw a fashion sketch or cut a pattern. She did not invent silhouettes, and she had no wish to found a school of couture to rival Paris. What she had was attention, and she was strict about where she spent it. She slept through the dresses because the dresses did not matter that season. The coats did, and she saw that sooner and more surely than anyone else in the room. By putting on her glasses she settled the question for the American trade. The New Yorker summed up her standing in a single line: "The whole trade watches her, copies her, envies her."
The name on the label was itself a piece of editing. She had been born Henrietta Kanengeiser, the daughter of poor Jewish parents in Vienna. Before she turned twenty-five she was calling herself Carnegie, after Andrew Carnegie, at that time the richest man in America. The steelmaker never knew it. The dress business never stopped knowing it. When Hilton Als looked back at her career in 1996, he concluded that "Carnegie's greatest invention may have been herself." That is close to the whole truth. It leaves out how much else she invented around that self: a building, a family firm, a price ladder that ran from $695 down to $16.50, a staff of designers who mostly became more famous than their training implied, and a nationwide habit among American women of accepting her judgment as their own.
Hattie Carnegie ran the most closely watched dress house in New York for about thirty years. The people who knew her best described her in ways that do not fit together. She was a gambler who kept her family on the books. She was a Francophile who dressed American women for work. She would not advertise, and late in her career she appeared in her own ads. She could flatten a grown man with her temper and then return "unruffled, detached, and vague as a sabre-toothed tiger after the kill." She delivered on her promise to American women in full. The record of her own life is less consistent: her birth year, her arrival in New York, the age at which she started at Macy's, and the number of her husbands all vary depending on which source you read. Fashion, after all, is the art of presenting the version that suits you.
By the Numbers
The House of Carnegie
4′10″Hattie Carnegie's height
142Buying trips to Europe between 1919 and September 1939
$3.5MAnnual sales in 1929, before the crash
$16.50Starting price of a Spectator Sports dress, her Depression line
1,000+Workers employed by her operation by 1940
$5Cost to sew her 1943 Life magazine dress at home, versus $175 made to order
$8MValue of the business at her death in 1956
A Name Borrowed From a Steel Man
The facts become uncertain as soon as you go back past 1909.
Most sources give her birth date as March 15, 1886. The Jewish Women's Archive and Wikipedia use that date. One reference work says March 14. The 1934 New Yorker profile, almost certainly based on what she told the reporter, puts her birth in 1889, and a long list of later fashion encyclopedias and dealers' catalogues repeat that year. When the New York Times reported her death in February 1956, its headline gave her age as 69. That fits 1886. It does not fit the age she was letting people believe in 1934, when the same magazine said she "could be any age from twenty-eight onward." The arrival in New York is just as unsettled: 1892 in some accounts, 1897 in another, 1900 in others. A woman who decided what other women would wear also seems to have decided which year she had been born.
On a few points the sources agree. She was the second of seven children of Isaac Kanengeiser and Hannah, born Kranczer. The family's house outside Vienna burned down. After the fire her father went to America, sent money back, and in time brought the family over. They lived on the Lower East Side, in a house on St. Marks Place, and the children went to public schools there. The girl called Hattie, short for Henrietta, liked to dress her dolls, though she could not sew then and, according to the New Yorker in 1934, "can't to this day."
Her schooling ended early. One account says it stopped when her father died in 1902. Another says she had only two years of public school. Another says she left at eleven. Every version has the same outcome: a child taking work to support a family. She was a messenger at Macy's, which the New Yorker called a "desk-girl." Wikipedia puts her there at thirteen and Als at eighteen. In her early teens she answered an advertisement for someone to pin hats in a millinery workroom, and then worked in other workrooms after that. The New Yorker reported that she "has been the backbone of the family ever since." Thirty years later the family was still on her payroll.
One detail from these years appears in nearly every retelling, which says something about how useful it was. Her entire wardrobe was a skirt and three blouses. With those she still managed to look so well put together that a neighborhood shop owner offered her clothes for free in return for her promoting the shop's merchandise. Before she ever made a hat for sale, she had found her first business model: she was the advertisement. Customers would want to look the way she looked in the clothes.
Then she changed her name. The Jewish Women's Archive says she was Carnegie by 1909. Other sources say "by her early twenties" or "by the time she was 20." The 1934 profile tells it as a family matter: "In Vienna, their name had been Kanengeiser, which, in America, became Carnegie." That wording hides an act of will in the passive voice. Andrew Carnegie had sold his steel company in 1901 and become the most visible example of what American money could do. He too was an immigrant, a Scottish bobbin boy who rose to the top of American industry. Taking his name meant claiming a lineage she did not have. It also meant joining the most famous American success story of the time.
Nancy Deihl, who directed the costume studies master's program at New York University, told Investor's Business Daily that the name "was a tribute to someone who she really upheld." She added: "It was also a career move." The name went on everything: a hatter's sign on East Tenth Street, a corporation, a building, a perfume, a line of brooches, and finally a jewelry company that would be in federal court in 1976, twenty years after the woman herself died. The CFDA, looking back, said she chose "Hattie" as well "for its aristocratic ring." That is plausible, but it is hard to hear anything aristocratic in "Hattie." What she was after was the surname, the one that sounded like money.
Her future husband grew up a few streets away. John Zanft was an East Side boy too, and by the New Yorker's account he had been "the love of her life since she was thirteen years old or thereabouts." It would take her more than twenty years and at least two other marriages to arrive at him.
The Hatter Above the Delicatessen
In 1909 she and a seamstress named Rose Roth opened a shop on East Tenth Street. The sign read Carnegie—Ladies' Hatter. Only one of the two names on the partnership made it onto the sign.
Almost nothing is recorded about Rose Roth beyond what her partner needed from her. She made the dresses. She worked, as one encyclopedia put it, "hard behind the scenes." Carnegie made or designed the hats, but more importantly she dealt with the customers. The arrangement split the business into its two essential parts, the person who makes and the person who sells, and history remembered the one who sold. Roth appears in the record as a function: seamstress, partner, someone eventually bought out. She gets about two sentences in every account of Hattie Carnegie, and she is the first of many skilled people whose work would carry another woman's name.
The prices were high from the beginning. "The clothes were never cheap, even in the beginning," the New Yorker reported, and it explained the appeal exactly: "Customers hoped the clothes would make them look the way Hattie Carnegie looked in them, and their friends hoped they would look as well as the Carnegie clients." That was the skirt-and-three-blouses method, scaled up. She did not advertise. A Fashion Institute of Technology history says she found advertising gauche. Instead she wore the clothes to the places where the customers she wanted already were: smart restaurants, the theater, the opera. She was the showroom and she went to her clients. The New Yorker noted that she liked these places "both for observation and for her own gratification." Her "Viennese soul," the magazine said, "adores rich surroundings, good food, and attractive people." She was working and she was enjoying herself, and the two were hard to separate.
The partnership did well enough that in 1913, "after only minor financial setbacks," it incorporated with $100,000 in capital and moved uptown to West Eighty-sixth Street near Riverside Drive, which was then a fashionable address. The new shop was on a corner of Broadway, upstairs, with a delicatessen on one side, a Chinese restaurant on the other, and by one account a laundry as well. Prices started at $75. Cooking smells came up into the fitting rooms "as rich women flocked in." Twenty years later, the New Yorker reported, the memory of those smells "embarrasses and amuses Miss Carnegie, but no one else seemed to mind." Mrs. William Randolph Hearst was a customer. So was Mrs. Harrison Williams, who would become one of the best-dressed women of her era. They came upstairs above the pickles and the chow mein because of the woman behind the counter.
Partnerships between a maker and a seller usually end when the seller decides the maker can be replaced. The New Yorker put it in one phrase: after a few years, "Hattie began feeling her creative oats." Another account says simply that by the end of the First World War the two women were "having more and more disagreements." Carnegie bought Roth out in 1918 or 1919, depending on the source, and founded Hattie Carnegie, Inc. The corporation took only her first name and her borrowed surname. "She couldn't draw fashion pictures and she couldn't sew a fine seam," the magazine wrote, "but she had a feeling about clothes and a personality to convey her ideas to the people who were to work them out." She had removed the only other name on the business. From then on everyone who did the sewing for her would be an employee.
Seven Times a Year to Paris
In 1919 she made her first buying trip to Europe. She was, the New Yorker said, "as happy and excited as a child." Over the next twenty years, until war closed Paris in September 1939, she made 142 such trips. That is roughly seven a year, which meant she spent a large share of the interwar period on ocean liners. If you start with the girl who had a skirt and three blouses, the figure is close to unbelievable. If you start with the woman who could not draw, it makes sense. If you cannot create a silhouette, you go to where silhouettes are created and you pick the best ones.
She did more than choose. She translated. The 1934 profile describes a trade that was "cowed by the prestige of the haute couture in Paris": American dressmakers who bought French models and copied them, at most "putting a Chanel collar on a Lanvin coat and embellishing the whole with Schiaparelli's latest fastenings." Carnegie did not pretend to originate anything. Her clothes, the magazine said, "derive openly and loyally from the French." Her real skill was "adapting the Paris fashion trend to the American temper." She believed, with a certain patriotic perversity, that "French clothes are most perfect when worn by American women." The figure that mattered was this: although she came back every season with large numbers of Paris models, "seventy or eighty per cent of her retail business is done with her own models." The Paris imports drew customers in. What they mostly bought was her version.
Sometimes she pushed the borrowing past the rules. In an April 1949 article in Collier's she said she had held a three-year exclusive on Madeleine Vionnet's models in the early 1920s. One fashion encyclopedia calls it "unauthorized" and notes that it came a few years before Vionnet began selling "to the trade." One reference work goes further and says Carnegie "discovered" and launched Vionnet. That is the kind of claim that builds up around a successful buyer, and it should be read with suspicion. The documented fact is smaller and more revealing: an American dressmaker had sewn up access to a major French couturier's work before that couturier had a policy for dealing with American buyers. Carnegie operated in the gaps between institutions.
The Paris trips were run like a campaign, and anyone in Paris who knew her in that period was likely to see it. She took a suite at the Ritz, and it filled with tradespeople carrying boxes of novelties for her to look at. "Telephones ring every two seconds," the New Yorker reported. Friends who came for cocktails were brought into the bedroom because the sitting room was full of merchandise. Rivals posing as friends tried to slide hatboxes out from under the bed while she was out of the room, "hoping to scoop some of her discoveries on littler streets." Milliners showed her their new hats while she was in the bath. In 1934, when riots broke out in Paris, her balcony over the Place de la Madeleine filled at night with onlookers. Guests would sip soup and hurry out to watch the crowds. She would get nervous and go back to the table, and then, "insatiable in her curiosity," return to the balcony, "munching her croissant." The magazine's summary was a single sentence: "She hates to miss anything lively."
She called these trips a rest.
Even the dull parts of importing ran through her company's name. On October 17, 1938, the United States Customs Court ruled on a protest filed by Hattie Carnegie, Inc., over the duty on some imported articles made chiefly of cellulose filaments. The court agreed with the company that the correct rate was 60 percent. It is a minor case. It belongs in this story because it shows the paperwork behind the Paris mystique: shipments to classify, tariffs to dispute, a corporation arguing over the fiber content of goods that would arrive on Forty-ninth Street dressed up as French.
The House on Forty-Ninth Street
She found out she was rich more or less by accident.
In 1926, according to the New Yorker, she had "$425,000 around in small banks, which rather surprised her when she looked the matter up." Other sources put the purchase in 1923 or 1925. All of them agree on the address: an old house at 42 East Forty-ninth Street, just off Park Avenue. She later bought the building next door as well. That townhouse became the base of her custom business for the rest of her life and the address American women associated with her. A woman who had once been a messenger at Macy's now owned the building her customers walked into.
Soon after she moved in, there was a bad fire. She was away, and her staff were afraid to tell her. When she found out, she shrugged and said it was a good omen. Her family's life in America had begun with a house burning down outside Vienna, so perhaps she had some basis for reading fire as the start of something. The New Yorker just recorded what she said and added: "How can you cope with a woman like that?"
The business that grew around the house was hers in a way that was rare then. "She is original," the 1934 profile observed, "in being, in fact as well as in name, the head of her own business." Nearly all the stock of Hattie Carnegie, Inc., belonged to her. Family members held the rest, and most of them worked in the company. She was president. Her brother Herman was secretary and treasurer. Her sister Celia was a director. In 1934 her brother Abe ran the wholesale business at 711 Fifth Avenue. A later reference names her brother Tony as wholesale manager, which suggests either a change of jobs among the siblings or a confusion in the record. The Kanengeiser children had become the Carnegie board.
One of the best scenes in the 1934 profile is about money. "Miss Carnegie's childlike fluttering in the matter of dollars and cents is a classic, when you consider her business achievements," the writer noted. "It is both infuriating and amusing, according to where you sit, to watch her pass the buck to her brother Herman when sordid business details come up and watch Herman deftly pass it back." The woman who bought dresses in Paris "regardless of cost" and only "weeks or months later" worked out how to pay for them had a brother whose job was to refuse to take the problem off her hands. The family set-up was more than sentiment. It was a form of governance. The person who said no to her could not be fired, and he was someone she could not ignore.
The building itself kept growing. By the 1940s it was close to a small department store: furs, lingerie, perfume, costume jewelry, antique furniture and glass, cosmetics, a fur salon, a millinery department with a ready-to-wear hat section, and a handbag department where a customer could order a bag made to match a particular outfit. A woman could be dressed, as people said at the time, from "hat to hem" there. The millinery operation had its own headquarters at 29 West Fifty-seventh Street. Perfume, jewelry, and cosmetics were made at a factory at 412 East Fifty-ninth Street. In the 1940s she added the Blue Room, which sold her own ready-to-wear and lines from other manufacturers, and Jeune Fille, a junior collection for daughters who would grow into their mothers' accounts.
The atmosphere inside does not match the usual idea of a couture house. "In both establishments, everyone calls 'Miss Carnegie!' at once," the New Yorker reported. "There is none of the cathedral hush that characterizes less self-sure establishments." She was everywhere: telling a tailor the fur he was holding up was wrong, taking phone calls, showing a model how to arrange a scarf, chatting with a favorite client. Her nearsighted eyes, the magazine said, "are everywhere at once." Those are the same eyes that put on horn-rimmed glasses for Lanvin's coats.
Then there was Magnin's. In 1929 her arrangement with I. Magnin, which held exclusive rights to sell her models in California, was worth half a million dollars a year to her. Magnin's dominated the Pacific Coast, and the New Yorker noted that "Hollywood eats out of its hand." It was a name with real power out West. Even so, Magnin's put Carnegie labels in her clothes rather than its own. Twenty years after Henrietta Kanengeiser borrowed a name from a steel magnate, California's most powerful store was setting aside its own name in favor of hers.
What the Walkers Owed
By 1929 Hattie Carnegie, Inc., was selling about $3.5 million worth of clothes a year. She could charge, and get, $695 for a wool dress with a fur-trimmed coat. Gertrude Lawrence, the English stage star, spent $22,000 with her in a single year and paid with one check. The list of customers read like a society column: Mrs. Ira Richards, Mrs. Howard Cushing, Mrs. Harrison Williams, Mrs. Walter Chrysler, "Whitneys and Harrimans and the rest." The film actresses came straight from the train to her door when they got to New York. Constance Bennett, Tallulah Bankhead, and Lilyan Tashman all wore her clothes in their pictures. Joan Crawford went further. She would wire Carnegie: "Send me something I'd like."
The New Yorker said she treated these women with "the whimsical tenderness she reserves for pet customers and friends." She "has never been known to bustle over, bully, or fawn on the greatest spender in the world." Customers complained about her prices and paid them, because "her simplest clothes have intricate detail which cannot be copied cheaply."
Then some of them stopped paying.
She did well through 1931. By 1932, the New Yorker wrote, "things looked more ominous." That fall her corporation filed two lawsuits that the papers covered closely. One was against James J. Walker, the mayor of New York, and his wife, for $12,059, the unpaid balance on a bill of $20,059. Walker was the most stylish mayor the city had ever had, and he was about to resign under the weight of a corruption inquiry. The other suit was against Clarence Budington Kelland, a prolific popular novelist, for $3,313. Kelland turned his refusal into a stand on principle. He said he was withholding payment to establish "that a husband is not necessarily responsible for the unreasonable debts his wife may contract," and he gave the press an itemized complaint:
— Clarence Budington Kelland, to the press, 1932, as quoted in The New YorkerMy financial condition would at no time justify . . . hose at $6.50, cloth coat at $420, dresses at $250 . . .
The Walker case reached judgment in her favor in March 1933. The bill covered chiffon handkerchiefs at $10 each and boxes of talcum powder at $7.75. The mayor of the largest city in the country had run up a bill at a dress shop for handkerchiefs and talc, and the shop had sued him. Through all of it Carnegie said only one thing in public about the case: "I made Mrs. Walker look very nice."
That line shows her character more clearly than anything else she is recorded as saying. It does not complain, explain, or attack Walker. It states that the work was done and done well, and implies that the money was owed for that reason. Nothing else about the matter interested her.
The private reaction was harder. "Hattie Carnegie woke up to the fact that people were broke," the New Yorker wrote. "She probably had had some inkling from her own activities in the stock market, but when customers couldn't or wouldn't pay, it struck home. She was quite low about it for a while." Then: "However, she soon did something about the situation."
What she did became her most important contribution to the business. Downstairs in the retail shop she opened a ready-to-wear department where a woman could buy a good copy of a Vionnet for $50. At 711 Fifth Avenue she started a new wholesale business called Spectator Sports. It sold clothes of her own design, made in a factory in Mount Vernon, New York, to stores across the country starting at $16.50. (A Fashion Institute of Technology history dates Spectator Sports to 1928, before the crash. The New Yorker, writing in 1934, presents it as a response to the Depression. Possibly it began earlier and was expanded under pressure. The sources do not settle it.) She "was amazed to see that such dresses could be made at the price," the profile reported, "and charmed to find that she almost immediately began to make more money from Spectator Sports than from any other branch of her business."
A woman who had been charging $695 for a dress-and-coat ensemble found, almost by accident, that $16.50 dresses made more money. She cut her Paris trips from four a year to two. "For a long time," the New Yorker said, "she felt that the business wasn't as much fun as before." That is an honest admission. What made her the most money was not what she most loved doing. What she loved, the magazine said, was clothes: "She hates to sell anything that is not the best, because anything but the best looks horrid to her."
At the wholesale showroom at 711 Fifth Avenue, which was decorated in brown and white satin, prices ran from $79.50 to about $300. Buyers came from selected shops, "one to every important town outside New York," and bought for "their country-club and Hollywood clientele the same clothes that New Yorkers buy at retail on Forty-ninth Street." Behind the showroom were acres of cutting rooms, shipping rooms, rows of sewing machines, and hundreds of workers. By 1934 Hattie Carnegie Originals were sold in stores across the country. By 1940 she employed more than a thousand people, most of them making ready-to-wear. The Jewish Women's Archive credits her with being, in 1925, "the first custom designer to create special collections for wholesale to department stores." The CFDA calls her "the first to begin selling a more affordable line to department stores." Whichever claim is correct, the arrangement she built lasted. A small, expensive house on Forty-ninth Street lent its prestige to a large, inexpensive operation in Mount Vernon, and the cheap clothes paid for the expensive ones.
The copyists followed. Her designs, one encyclopedia notes, were "pirated by unscrupulous entrepreneurs." She found this irritating and kept going. She had also borrowed, from Paris, from Vionnet, from a steel baron's name, and she understood better than most that you cannot stop people copying good taste. You can only stay ahead of them.
The Boys
She called her design assistants "the boys." In 1934 there were three assistant designers and two sketchers, and she worked through four collections a year with them. Over three decades the list of people who passed through her house became, in effect, a list of the best-known names in mid-century American fashion: Norman Norell, Claire McCardell, Pauline Trigère, Jean Louis, James Galanos, Travis Banton, Muriel King, Gustave Tassell, and Pauline Fairfax Potter, who ran the made-to-order department for almost ten years and later, as Pauline de Rothschild, became one of the great figures of twentieth-century taste.
Norell came in 1928 and stayed until 1941, thirteen years of producing, in one reference work's words, "one successful dress after another." Thirteen years is a long time to design under someone else's name. Norell put his talent into her label for more than a decade before his own name meant anything.
McCardell's time there was shorter and more telling. In 1939, after the manufacturer she had worked for, Townley Frocks, closed, Carnegie hired her. McCardell worked alongside Norell, designing for private clients and producing a line called "Workshop Originals." Her sketches from that year survive with fabric swatches pinned to them and notes on yardage, pricing, production times, and clients: Joan Crawford, Miriam Hopkins, Gertrude Lawrence, Ginger Rogers, Mrs. Paley, Mrs. Guggenheim, Mrs. Laddie Sanford. One of them, a brown-and-ivory striped wrap dress with a sweetheart neckline, appears to match a dress now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In the end, a scholarly summary of that series concludes, "McCardell's designs proved to be too casual for Carnegie and her clientele." The woman who would become one of the names most associated with the American Look was, for Carnegie's Forty-ninth Street customers, slightly too relaxed. Even her strongest hires had to pass her filter.
She did not treat any of them as indispensable. "Another mark of her independence," the 1934 profile observed, "is her belief that no one person is in any way vital to her business." Designers and executives she had trained had "left her without warning, actuated by temperament or avarice, or by an ambition to be famous on their own." She regarded these "black sheep" with an "almost maternal attitude," which rested on "her conviction that they are relatively unimportant." She hired generously and casually, mostly people she liked, and the system worked because most of the jobs paid on commission. If a hire did not work out, it cost her little.
Her generosity and her temper were part of the same management style. "She is nice about lending clothes to employees who want to make an impression on some particular evening," the profile noted. "From the backbone of her organization, however, she takes no nonsense." Her temper, by every account, was something to see. "She can reduce the strongest man to a pulp in less time than it takes to tell it." Then it would pass, and she would go back to what she had been doing.
One of her models was a young woman from upstate New York named Lucille Ball. In 1928 Ball, then unknown, joined the house as an in-house model. Carnegie told her to bleach her brown hair blonde, and Ball did. Ball went to Hollywood, came back to New York in 1932, and supported herself by working for Carnegie again and by appearing as the Chesterfield cigarette girl. Long after she had become the most famous comedian in America, Ball still described those years in terms of what she had learned:
— Lucille Ball, quoted in Stefan Kanfer's Ball of FireHattie taught me how to slouch properly in a $1,000 hand-sewn sequin dress and how to wear a $40,000 sable coat as casually as rabbit.
To slouch properly, and to wear sable as if it were rabbit: this was Carnegie teaching what she had taught herself in a skirt and three blouses. Expensive clothes should look like they belong to the wearer, not the other way around. Carnegie was not training Ball to model. She was training her to look as if she had always had money.
The best description of what Carnegie did came from a designer who never worked for her. Geoffrey Beene, back in New York after studying in Paris, went to her house first looking for a job:
— Geoffrey BeeneI knew Mrs. Carnegie was not a designer but a great, great editor and I had heard of her reputation for superb taste. I never worked for her—but if she were here now, I would still be trying!
"A great, great editor." The term fits her more exactly than "designer," "couturier," or "retailer" do. An editor decides what will appear under her name and lets others do the writing. Everyone who sewed or drew for the house was in some sense a contributor, and the masthead had only one name on it.
Mrs. John Zanft
The public saw her one way. The 1934 profile described her as tiny and feminine, with pink-and-white skin "but not too carefully so," narrowed eyes that were "amused and humorous," and a "deep, metallic voice" that would have been perfect for radio. She would not go on the radio. She disliked personal publicity. She would not "'educate' American women by pompous interviews." She did not go to fashion lunches. "Newspaper women and fashion experts bore her to death," the magazine wrote, "since most of them see Significances in a ruffle or a train, and Hattie Carnegie likes people who feel clothes, not those who are informed about them."
When she went out in public she preferred another name altogether. "In public places, she dislikes to attract attention and sallies forth as Mrs. John Zanft, demure as anything." The woman who had made one assumed name famous used a second one to move around unnoticed.
The marriages are the hardest part of her life to pin down, and the sources only partly agree. According to the New Yorker, in her late teens, "before she was sure John Zanft was the only man for her," she married an Englishman. The marriage "was of short duration, though regaining her freedom took years." Later, apparently after an especially long quarrel with Zanft, she announced "I'll show that John Zanft," married someone else, and sailed to Europe alone that same night. Wikipedia identifies one of these husbands as Ferdinand Fleischman, a well-known New York florist and the son of Joseph Fleischman, a florist and hotelier who founded the Fleischman Baths. They married around 1922 or 1923. She was his second wife, and the marriage gave her a stepson, Frederick, born in 1915. It did not last. In September 1924 Fleischman married again, and his third wife was Sallie White, the former wife of Abraham White and a friend and client of Carnegie's. The client list and the marriage records overlapped in ways the 1934 profile was too polite to spell out.
She married Zanft in Philadelphia on August 22, 1928. One source dates it a year earlier. He was born in 1883, a few years before her. He had been a vice president and general manager of the William Fox theaters and had worked in newspapers and at a brokerage. His title of Major came from the war. By 1934 he had set up in Hollywood as an agent for stars, with Marie Dressler, a family friend, at the top of his list. The New Yorker called him "big and bluff and a very busy person." The two of them fought constantly. "She gets so mad at him. She hangs up on him in the midst of telephone conversations and then waits, foot tapping, for him to call back. She and John Aren't Speaking." Her travels to Europe and his work on the West Coast kept them apart much of the time, and the magazine noted that long-distance and transatlantic operators "rejoice" when they were separated.
Zanft wanted her to stop working. He also thought, the New Yorker reported, "that she should be decorated, as artists in her line are decorated by their governments abroad." Both wishes are worth remembering. One came true eighteen years later.
At home on upper Fifth Avenue she lived among imported French surroundings. The duplex had its own street entrance, and its entire interior had been shipped over from France: paneling and furniture from the various Louis periods that "would make a curator's mouth water." Zanft's bedroom and the "playroom" were modern. Her bed had satin sheets and a mink coverlet. Her linens were kept in paneled closets tied with pale brown ribbon. She was always rearranging the furniture, replacing a piece with one she liked better, consulting upholsterers. She edited her apartment the same way she edited a collection.
She loved giving dinner parties, going dancing, good food, and good champagne and brandy. She liked to cook, or at least to eat well enough that she periodically had to diet, and she would try "every new diet racket for a day or so." She gambled, and the stakes did not much matter to her. "She plays backgammon badly and with passion, and a chemin de fer table draws her like a magnet." The magazine applied the same gambling vocabulary to her business decisions: "she makes decisions like lightning, with a deceptive air of slapdash; she faces her mistakes like a good gambler." It was her poker-faced calm, the profile said, that made people afraid of her. "People don't understand it."
Visitors to the apartment found little talk about the business there. "She seldom has people around her just because they are important in her business." There she was "hospitable and talkative and unbusinesslike." On Forty-ninth Street she was Miss Carnegie, everywhere at once. At the restaurant table she was Mrs. Zanft. At home, behind paneling brought from France, she was the girl from St. Marks Place who had finally gotten everything she wanted.
Uniforms for Use
In September 1939 war cut Hattie Carnegie off from Paris, the source she had relied on for twenty years and 142 trips.
The New Yorker had once reported that she "would be lost if she didn't go abroad at least twice a year." She was not lost. A 1945 profile reported that "cut off from Paris for the past five years, limited to government restrictions on fabric use, she has nevertheless retained in her clothes the distinction which is known as 'the Carnegie look.'" By then it described her as "absolute boss of a $6,500,000 dress business" who had come up from poverty "with a 'look,' a little suit and a knowledge of all the angles." In the early 1930s she had been "the great American spokesman for the Parisian influence in fashion." With Paris closed, she became something more lasting. Her name, "along with Claire McCardell," the 1945 account said, was "synonymous with the wider known American Look." McCardell had been too casual for her in 1939. Five years later the two were mentioned together.
The Carnegie look, by every description, was about restraint. Her palette was narrow. Many day suits were gray or brown. Her most striking evening dresses were black, apart from an occasional ermine tail. Later she favored a particular blue that became known as "Carnegie Blue." Her signature garment was "the little Carnegie suit": a jacket nipped at the waist over a skirt rounded at the hips. It became a status symbol for an entire generation of women. A customer once described the typical Carnegie dress as "healthy, normal, attractive, gay and nifty," words that would never have been used for Schiaparelli. She held what the 1945 writer called the "serene conviction that women dress to please men," and she wanted a woman entering a room to hear "What a beautiful woman!" and not "What a beautiful dress!" Her own phrasing was sharper: "If you have a dress that is too often admired, be suspicious of it."
Writing in 1996, Als put the restraint in historical terms. While Dior and Balenciaga were "exploring artifice and flair for the international woman of mystery," a Carnegie dress or suit "was meant to be unobtrusive, in order not to deflect from the personality of the wearer—or from her accomplishments." In the forties and early fifties, "as American women became more of a force in the workplace, they began buying Carnegie's uniforms-for-use in ever greater numbers," completing the outfit with Carnegie hats, gloves, bags, and perfume, "in order to be efficient and feminine, streamlined for productivity." The woman who loved satin sheets and Louis XV paneling had become, by a long route, the outfitter of American women going to work.
The government noticed. During the war it approached her from time to time to help introduce "certain little economies in the handling of materials." Mass manufacturers copied the techniques almost immediately, "convinced they had seized another glamorous Carnegie secret." The April 12, 1943, issue of Life published "Life's Dress," a Carnegie design for women sewing at home. Made to order in her salon, the magazine said, it would cost $175. A reader with a pattern and some fabric could make it for as little as $5. This took her pricing range to its lowest possible level. Twenty years after she had bought a townhouse off Park Avenue, she was giving her design away, more or less, to anyone with a sewing machine and a copy of Life. She still could not sew. Now a whole country could sew her designs for her.
Then came the uniform. In 1950 she was asked to apply her design sense to the uniform of the Women's Army Corps. Her design was adopted for wear on New Year's Day, 1951. On June 1, 1952, she received the Congressional Medal of Freedom for the WAC uniform and for her many other charitable and patriotic contributions. The uniform was still in use for women in the Army in 1968, twelve years after her death. She had already received the Neiman-Marcus Award in 1939 and the American Fashion Critics' Award, the Coty, in 1948, for "consistent contribution to American elegance." The medal was different. It was the kind of national honor Zanft had once said she deserved, the way governments abroad honored their artists.
The house's best-known product was a suit that made a woman look capable and kept attention on her rather than on the fabric. Its most widely worn product was a uniform, a suit cut for thousands of women at the same time. It was given by a government to women it was sending to work, and it was designed by an Austrian immigrant who had named herself after a steel company's founder.
Heat-Sensitive
Hattie Carnegie died in New York City on February 22, 1956. The Times gave her age as 69, contradicting the birth year she had given out for decades. At her death the business she had built was valued at $8 million. A collectors' book about her jewelry estimates a peak of ten million. Its five businesses covered custom and ready-to-wear clothing, hats, perfume, accessories, and costume jewelry. There were shops in Manhattan, Southampton, and Palm Beach. Her name, as one obituary-based encyclopedia entry put it, was "truly a household word."
The name outlived her by twenty years, and the business without her did not hold up.
Zanft, who had always wanted her to leave the business, took charge of it. He lived only until 1960. After that a former employee, Larry Joseph, ran it. The 1934 profile had recorded her belief that no single person was vital to her business. She had been right about everyone except herself. "Much of the desirability of the label," one archive notes, "lay in the woman herself, and after her death the label lost much of its luster." The couture salon, which had always been the core of the business, closed in 1965. Hats, accessories, and jewelry continued. In the late 1930s the house had begun making costume jewelry to go with its clothes: figural brooches of animals, flowers, and insects, beaded florals, Egyptian Revival pieces, signed "Hattie Carnegie" or "HC." Today, as Georgiana McCall writes in Hattie Carnegie® Jewelry: Her Life and Legacy, "Hattie Carnegie's jewelry is what has lasted." The suits are in museums: the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Texas Fashion Collection, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Dealers and collectors buy and sell the brooches.
The company's last public appearance was in a federal appeals court.
On September 19, 1975, a company called Hattie Carnegie Jewelry Enterprises, Ltd., placed a notice in Women's Wear. It held a license from Bill G. James, a Californian, to make rings under his Patent No. 3,802,945, titled "Heat Sensitive Novelty Device." The material used in the rings could be bought commercially. James did not claim to have invented it. The rings' appeal, as the court later described it, was that "changes in temperature activate a change in the color of the transparent 'stones.'" Eight days after the notice, the company's lawyers telegraphed Gimbel's department store to say that "the 'personality ring' now being sold by you" infringed the patent and threatened "prompt and stringent action." On October 2, 1975, they sued Gimbel's. Two distributors of competing color-change rings, Capri Jewelry and Tancer & Two, sued in return. On May 26, 1976, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in an opinion by Judge Henry Friendly, ruled against Hattie Carnegie Jewelry Enterprises. By then the company that had grown out of a hatter's sign on East Tenth Street was nearly finished. The business closed for good that year.
The last thing sold under her name was a ring with a glass stone set on a woman's finger. The stone had no fixed color. It took its color from the warmth of the hand that wore it.
Part IIThe Playbook
Hattie Carnegie left no memoir and no stated management philosophy, and as far as the record shows she gave almost no interviews about how she ran her business. Her methods have to be inferred from what she did: where she put her money, whom she hired and how loosely she held on to them, which customers she sued, which trips she cut back, which dresses she slept through. The principles below come from that record. Some of them are strong enough to use today. A few of them, the last one in particular, are warnings.
The principles
- 1.Be the editor, not the author.
- 2.Borrow prestige, then make it yours.
- 3.Translate, don't originate.
- 4.Wear the product where the customer already is.
- 5.Spend attention like capital.
- 6.Let the downturn show you the real market.
- 7.Lend the top of the brand to the bottom of the business.
- 8.Treat talent as essential and no individual as indispensable.
- 9.Own the building, the stock, and the person who says no.
- 10.Make the product quieter than the customer.
- 11.Decide like a gambler, interpret like an optimist.
- 12.Plan for the brand to survive the founder, or expect it not to.
Carnegie could not sew, draw, or cut a pattern, and she never claimed to invent silhouettes. In a field that admired the creator, that should have disqualified her. Instead she built the most closely watched house on Seventh Avenue on a different skill: choosing. Geoffrey Beene's description, "not a designer but a great, great editor," is a precise account of where her value lay. Her advantage was in selecting, refusing, combining, and putting a single name over many people's work.
Editing scales differently from making. One designer can produce a limited number of good dresses a season. An editor with good judgment can direct three assistant designers, two sketchers, more than a thousand workers, and a Norell and a McCardell, while also buying from Lanvin, Vionnet, Chanel, and Schiaparelli. Her lack of craft skills was a constraint that pushed her toward the most valuable role available. Founders who cannot do the core work themselves have to get very good at judging it, and that skill is scarcer.
Editing also requires saying no, including to strong talent. McCardell's work was "too casual" for Carnegie's customers in 1939, and Carnegie said so, even though history later sided with McCardell. An editor who accepts everything good is not editing. The filter is the product.
Tactic: Write a one-paragraph definition of what your company publishes and what it never will, and use it to reject at least one strong piece of work each quarter.
Principle 2
Borrow prestige, then make it yours
She borrowed twice, and both times she paid it back with interest. She took the surname of the richest man in America at a time when she owned a skirt and three blouses. She took her silhouettes from Paris, openly and loyally, in an industry that was intimidated by French couture. Neither borrowing would have meant much by itself. A borrowed name with no business behind it is a costume, and borrowed designs with no point of view are what the New Yorker called "putting a Chanel collar on a Lanvin coat."
What turned the borrowing into ownership was performance. Within twenty years, I. Magnin, which Hollywood "eats out of its hand," was putting Carnegie labels in her clothes instead of its own. The surname had stopped referring to Andrew Carnegie and now referred to her. Seventy to eighty percent of her retail sales came from her own models, not the Paris imports she featured.
The lesson is about sequence. Borrowed prestige gets a customer through the door once. Only consistent delivery makes the borrowed signal mean something new. She used the Carnegie name and the Paris label as introductions and then let the clothes do the rest.
Tactic: Identify the borrowed signal your company depends on (an investor, a former employer, a famous client, a category leader) and set a date by which your own track record must replace it.
Principle 3
Translate, don't originate
The New Yorker identified her real gift as "adapting the Paris fashion trend to the American temper." She was not trying to beat Paris. She was the bridge between Paris and the American woman, and the bridge turned out to be the more profitable position. Couturiers made the risky creative bets. Carnegie picked the winners after the shows and rebuilt them for customers who wanted French flair along with comfort, practicality, and clothes that did not overshadow the wearer.
Translation is underrated as a strategy because it does not look original. It needs two kinds of fluency: knowing the source well enough to spot what matters (only the coats at Lanvin that year), and knowing the destination well enough to change what needs changing. Most imitators have only one. They copy the source without adapting, or they know their market and have no feel for the source. Carnegie had both. The 142 trips gave her the first, and the Forty-ninth Street fitting rooms gave her the second.
H
The Translator's Ladder
How Carnegie turned Paris ideas into American products at every price point, according to the documented figures.
| Channel | Documented price | Role |
|---|---|---|
| Custom salon, 42 East 49th St. (1929) | $695 for wool dress and fur-trimmed coat | Prestige |
| Wholesale, 711 Fifth Ave. (1934) | $79.50 to about $300 | Reach |
| Downstairs ready-to-wear (1930s) | $50 for a good Vionnet copy | Reach |
| Spectator Sports, made in Mount Vernon | From $16.50 | Profit engine |
| "Life's Dress," April 12, 1943 | $175 made to order; about $5 home-sewn | Influence |
| Mass-market piracy | Uncontrolled | Leakage |
Tactic: For your next product decision, write down what you are deliberately keeping from the best existing version and what you are deliberately changing for your market. If you can't fill in both columns, you are copying, not translating.
Principle 4
Wear the product where the customer already is
She did not advertise in her early decades and is said to have considered it gauche. Instead she wore the clothes herself to the restaurants, theaters, and opera houses where her customers spent their evenings. The New Yorker described the customer's reasoning exactly: women "hoped the clothes would make them look the way Hattie Carnegie looked in them." This was her first business arrangement, too, from the shop owner who dressed a girl with three blouses in exchange for her promoting the shop.
The approach worked because it was real. She liked those places: the Casino, the Colony, the good food and attractive company. Her "own gratification" and her "observation" were the same activity, so she could sustain it for decades without it feeling like a campaign. She also learned from it. A founder who goes where her customers go collects market information that no survey would provide.
There is a contradiction in the record. By the 1940s, one archive says, she "was often featured in her own ads." The method seems to have changed once the business reached national scale. A woman can walk into one dining room at a time, and an advertisement can be in every town at once. Her principle was about authenticity, not a ban on media. She moved from the restaurant to the ad page only after the restaurant had made her face worth showing.
Tactic: Find the three places your best customers spend unhurried time and be there as a participant, using the product, before you spend money on paid acquisition.
Principle 5
Spend attention like capital
She slept through the Lanvin dresses and was fully alert for the coats. That is the clearest picture available of how she allocated attention: nothing went to what did not matter, everything went to what did, and she did not care how it looked. She was nearsighted, and she put on glasses only when there was something worth seeing in detail.
The same pattern shows up elsewhere. She refused radio, fashion lunches, and "pompous interviews," and she found fashion experts who "see Significances in a ruffle" boring. She would not spend time with people who were important to her business just because they were important. Yet the New Yorker reported that her "nearsighted eyes are everywhere at once" on the shop floor, correcting a tailor's fur, adjusting a scarf, talking with a favorite client. She let go of everything outside the product and the customer, and paid close attention to both.
Rivals read her attention as a signal. When she sat up at Lanvin, the trade cabled home. A leader whose attention is known to be selective gives her choices extra weight, because people know she does not hand out attention freely.
Tactic: List every recurring commitment on your calendar, mark the ones that put you directly in front of the product or the customer, and cut or delegate half of the rest.
Principle 6
Let the downturn show you the real market
In 1929 she was charging $695 for a dress and coat. By 1932 she was suing the mayor of New York over handkerchiefs. The New Yorker reports that she was "quite low about it for a while." Then she opened a $50 ready-to-wear department downstairs and launched Spectator Sports at $16.50, and she found out that the cheap line "almost immediately" earned more money than any other part of her business.
The lesson is not only to cut prices in a recession. The Depression showed her something about her market that the boom had concealed. The large opportunity was never the few women who could spend $22,000 in a year. It was the many women who wanted the Carnegie look and could pay $16.50. Prosperity had kept her focused on the top of the market. Unpaid bills made her look at everyone else.
She was also honest about the cost. The business "wasn't as much fun as before." She cut Paris trips from four a year to two. She did not pretend that the profitable change was also the enjoyable one, and she made it anyway. When expensive clothes started selling again, "her morale" returned, and by then she had both businesses.
Tactic: When customers stop paying, look past the collections problem and ask which much larger group of buyers you have been ignoring because the high end was easy.
Principle 7
Lend the top of the brand to the bottom of the business
Carnegie's structure depended on the expensive end supporting the cheap end. The custom salon on Forty-ninth Street, with its society women, Hollywood stars, and $695 ensembles, gave the name its meaning. The wholesale lines, the Mount Vernon factory, and the department store accounts turned that meaning into volume. The Jewish Women's Archive credits her with being the first custom designer to make special collections for wholesale to department stores, in 1925. Whether or not she was first, she built the model that later American designers would use.
The arrangement works only if the top stays real. The New Yorker noted that buyers at 711 Fifth Avenue bought for their country-club customers "the same clothes that New Yorkers buy at retail on Forty-ninth Street." The connection between the tiers was actual, not just a label. The custom salon was always "the foundation of her business and reputation," and she kept it going until her death even though the cheaper lines made more money. The prestige business was not the profit center, and it was not optional either. Everything else depended on it.
Tactic: Identify the part of your business that generates its prestige but not its profit, and protect its budget and quality explicitly, because the profitable parts depend on it.
Principle 8
Treat talent as essential and no individual as indispensable
Norell, McCardell, Trigère, Galanos, Jean Louis, and Pauline Potter all passed through her house, and most of them became better known than their training years would have predicted. She was clearly good at finding talent. She was just as clear that none of them were indispensable. The 1934 profile records her "conviction that they are relatively unimportant" and her "almost maternal attitude toward these black sheep" who left "without warning, actuated by temperament or avarice, or by an ambition to be famous on their own."
The structure behind this was practical. She hired "generous[ly] and casual[ly]," mostly on commission, so a wrong hire cost little and a right one paid for itself. She lent employees clothes for important evenings. She "takes no nonsense" from the people who made up the "backbone of her organization." Generosity at the edges and toughness at the center let her take many small bets on people without becoming dependent on any one of them.
There was a cost. A house that teaches great designers will lose them, and hers lost them steadily, and sometimes, as with McCardell, they went on to define the movement she later came to represent. She seems to have accepted that as the price of a pipeline of talent. In her view the name was the asset, and the people who sewed for it would change.
Tactic: Structure compensation for experimental hires so a failure costs you little, and assume your best people will eventually leave to build their own names. Plan your bench with that in mind.
Principle 9
Own the building, the stock, and the person who says no
Carnegie was "in fact as well as in name" the head of her own business. Nearly all the stock was hers and the rest belonged to family. She owned 42 East Forty-ninth Street and, later, the building next door. She owned her factories and was known to work directly on the factory floor, changing a hem or moving a button. In an industry where, as the New Yorker noted, most dressmakers "lean heavily on the burly shoulders of Seventh Avenue manufacturers" and farm work out to small contractors, she controlled her whole operation.
The least obvious form of ownership was her brother Herman. As secretary and treasurer, his job included refusing to take the hard financial details off her hands. "Watch her pass the buck to her brother Herman . . . and watch Herman deftly pass it back." She bought in Paris "regardless of cost" and worked out how to pay later. A founder like that needs someone in the structure who cannot be overruled and will not be scared off. Family gave her that, and so did the fact that ownership stayed inside the family.
C
Conventional Practice vs. the Carnegie Approach
How Carnegie's structure differed from the 1930s American dressmaker described by The New Yorker.
| Typical 1930s dressmaker | Hattie Carnegie, Inc. |
|---|---|
| Buys French models and copies them. | Imports French models, but 70–80% of retail sales are her own designs. |
| Leans on Seventh Avenue manufacturers. | Owns her own factories, including Mount Vernon and East 59th Street. |
| Farms work out to "little" tailors and embroiderers. | Keeps cutting rooms, sewing floors, and hundreds of workers under one roof. |
| Attends fashion lunches and "educates" women in interviews. | Refuses radio, publicity, and fashion lunches. |
| Treats the star designer as the house. | Treats no single designer as vital to the business. |
| Outside investors or partners. | Nearly all stock held by Carnegie; remainder by working family members. |
Tactic: Name the person in your company whose job is to hand the hardest financial problems back to you, and make sure their position doesn't depend on keeping you happy.
Principle 10
Make the product quieter than the customer
"If you have a dress that is too often admired, be suspicious of it." She wanted a woman entering a room to hear "What a beautiful woman!" and not "What a beautiful dress!" Her palette was mostly grays, browns, and black. Als describes her clothes as "meant to be unobtrusive, in order not to deflect from the personality of the wearer—or from her accomplishments."
This was a deliberate position, and it suited the customer she was serving. Dior and Balenciaga dressed "the international woman of mystery." Carnegie dressed women who were increasingly going to work in the forties and fifties, women who needed clothes that signaled competence without calling attention to themselves. Restraint made her suits durable. Her WAC uniform was still in use in 1968. Showy designs date quickly, and quiet ones keep selling.
There is a commercial logic underneath. When the product makes the customer look good instead of drawing praise for itself, the customer gives the credit to her own taste, and people come back to things that make them feel capable. "I made Mrs. Walker look very nice" says the same thing in a sentence. The measure of the work was the client, not the dress.
Tactic: Test your product by asking customers what it did for them, not what they think of it. If they mostly describe the product and not themselves, it is drawing too much attention to itself.
Principle 11
Decide like a gambler, interpret like an optimist
She "makes decisions like lightning, with a deceptive air of slapdash; she faces her mistakes like a good gambler." She loved chemin de fer and played backgammon "badly and with passion." When her new building caught fire just after she moved in, she shrugged and called it a good omen. This calm, "of the pokerfaced type," the New Yorker wrote, "makes her feared. People don't understand it."
Two habits are involved, and both can be learned. The first is speed. She bought dresses in Paris on instinct and dealt with payment afterward, and her instincts were usually right. Fast decisions with honest acceptance of losses beat slow decisions that try to avoid all losses, especially in a business that runs on seasons, where a late decision is a wrong one. The second is how she interpreted events. Calling a fire a good omen is not denial. It is a way of deciding how the people around you will read the setback, and a business takes its cue from its leader's reaction to bad news.
The gambler's attitude has limits, and the Depression showed them. Her "own activities in the stock market" probably gave her some warning of what was coming. Even good gamblers lose. What distinguished her was how fast she moved after the loss.
Tactic: For your next important decision, set a deadline measured in hours, not weeks, and decide in advance what you will say to your team if it goes badly.
Principle 12
Plan for the brand to survive the founder, or expect it not to
This principle is a warning. She was convinced that "no one person is in any way vital to her business," and for thirty years that held for everyone except her. After her death in 1956 her husband ran the business until he died in 1960, and then a former employee took over. The couture salon closed in 1965. The company ended in 1976, mid-lawsuit over color-change rings. "Much of the desirability of the label," one archive concluded, "lay in the woman herself."
The same features that made the business strong made it fragile. Concentrated family ownership kept control with her and left no outside stakeholders pushing for succession planning. The editor model put all judgment in one person and gave designers no reason to stay and inherit, since the most talented ones always left to build their own names. Her name was the brand, the name was her own invention, and nobody else could fill it.
T
The Arc of Hattie Carnegie, Inc.
Key dates in the rise and decline of the house, from the sources.
1909
Opens "Carnegie—Ladies' Hatter" on East Tenth Street with seamstress Rose Roth.
1913
Incorporates with $100,000 in capital; moves to West 86th Street near Riverside Drive.
1918–19
Buys out Roth; founds Hattie Carnegie, Inc.; makes first buying trip to Europe.
1923–26
Buys 42 East 49th Street (sources differ on the year).
1928
Norman Norell joins; Lucille Ball models; ready-to-wear introduced; marries John Zanft.
1929
Annual sales reach $3.5 million.
1932
Sues Mayor James J. Walker and novelist Clarence Budington Kelland over unpaid bills.
1939
Receives Neiman-Marcus Award; hires Claire McCardell; war cuts off Paris.
1943
"Life's Dress" published: $175 made to order, about $5 home-sewn.
1948
Receives Coty American Fashion Critics' Award.
1951
Her Women's Army Corps uniform adopted on New Year's Day.
1952
Awarded the Congressional Medal of Freedom on June 1.
1956
Dies February 22; business valued at $8 million.
1965
Couture salon closes.
1976
Second Circuit rules against Hattie Carnegie Jewelry Enterprises; company closes.
Tactic: If your judgment is the product, start now on writing it down: what you choose, what you reject, and why. Train a successor in that judgment, not just in operations, while you are still around to correct them.
Free playbook
Get The Business Model Playbook
58 business models, one visual page each: how the money flows, the metrics that matter, and who runs it. Free when you join the Faster Than Normal email.
Free. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.
Part IIIQuotes and Maxims
In their words
— Hattie Carnegie, via the Jewish Women's ArchiveTo show the American woman herself off to best advantage—that has always been my aim and that is my real biography.
— Hattie CarnegieSimple, beautiful clothes … enhance the charm of the woman who wears them. If you have a dress that is too often admired, be suspicious of it.
— Hattie Carnegie, on the lawsuit against Mayor James J. Walker, as quoted in The New Yorker, 1934I made Mrs. Walker look very nice.
— Hattie Carnegie, as quoted in a 1945 profileIt's much better to wear clothes that are too young for you than clothes which are too old!
— Joan Crawford, in her telegrams to Carnegie, as reported by The New Yorker, 1934Send me something I'd like.
Maxims
- Edit what you cannot make. Being unable to do the craft is not disqualifying if your judgment about the craft is better than anyone else's.
- Borrow the name, then earn it. Borrowed prestige gets you in the door once. Your record has to keep you there.
- Translate for the customer in front of you. Being the bridge to an existing source is often worth more than being the source.
- Be your own showroom. The most convincing advertisement is the founder using the product where her customers already are.
- Sleep through the dresses, wake for the coats. Spend attention only where it counts, and let people see you spend it.
- Let unpaid bills redirect you. When the top of the market stops paying, look at the much larger market below it.
- The prestige line pays for the volume line in reputation. Protect the expensive part even when the cheap part makes more money.
- Hire loosely, expect departures. Good people will leave to build their own names, so set up the business to keep going when they do.
- Keep someone close who says no. A founder who decides fast needs a person whose job is to make her face the numbers.
- Make the product quieter than the person. When people compliment the dress instead of the woman, the dress has gone too far.
