Cherrys, Feathers, and Ribbons Down My Back: New York City's Easter Parade.

The culmination of ‘Holy Week’ might as well stop at the intersection of East 50th Street and fifth avenue in New York City. As the street bisects Saint Patrick's Cathedral (built 1879) and the New York City Saks Fifth Ave (built 1924) Since the late nineteenth century, Easter has developed a relationship with the highly illustrious avenue. The development of department stores in the postindustrial period counterbalances the piousness and construction of the Neo-Gothic Cathedrals throughout New York City. As these two forms fight for prominence in American culture, they learn to usurp each other and use consumption and religion to their own benefit. By looking at the phenomenon of the Easter Parade, which trails Fifth Avenue and specifically the hats women wore during the period, I look at the millinery business as a female owned operation that helped to challenged the cult of domesticity and helped women become actively engaged members in commerce. 

1. Florine Stettheimer (American, 1871-1944) The Cathedrals of Fifth Avenue (1931). Oil on Canvas. Metropolitan Museum of Art. 
   

Florine Stettheimer (1871-1944) comments on the importance of department stores within New York City in her 1931 painting The Cathedrals of Fifth Avenue. Within the tableaux a bride and groom exit the grandiose facade of a cathedral to the fanfare of many onlookers. The dreamscape of pastel colors commemorate the importance of consumption during the period; focusing in on restaurants eg., Delmonicos and Sherrys; speciality shops eg., Maillards Sweets, Hudnuts Cosmetics, and Tiffany’s Jewelers;  and department stores eg., B. Altman and Henri Bendels. This homage to luxury branding and shopping exposes the commercialization of post-industrial life in which the elites were able to challenge the myth of piety brought by the puritanical roots of America and transform the culture into one of consumption. 

This phenomenon is best brought to light by Theostein Veblen in his text Theory of the Leisure Class (1899). In this dual critique and analysis, Veblen studies the upper crust of American society to understand their consumption and leisure practices; looking toward the semiotic relationship between perceived wealth and actual spending in post-industrial society. Written during the Gilded Age, a period of massive wealth disparities between classes, Veblen recalibrated the understanding of industrialization's effect on society. Therefore, while industrialization created such models as the department store and more leisure time, it also created a demand for larger amounts of unskilled labor and long hours for a human to sit behind a machine under horrific working conditions. 

The text, although less about labor and conditions for workers, underlies this relationship between the wealthy, leisure classes and the financially disadvantaged, working classes and how their consumption patterns lead the limitless growth of commodities within the closed circuit of production. Arguably the predominant point of the text lies in the theory of conspicuous consumption; the idea that people consume products and activities just to show off power and prestige. Of course, in a time before social media, the most obvious form of conspicuous consumption related to dress and that of women’s dress is highly emphasized. He states, “Since the consumption of these more excellent goods is an evidence of wealth, it becomes honorific; and conversely, the failure to consume in due quality becomes a mark of inferiority and demerit.” (Veblen, 53) Under capitalism, all forms of consumption are good forms of consumption, unless you are living beyond your means. This sets up the fetishization of objects in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. 

Commodity fetishism, described under Marxist pedagogy explains the relationship between consumer and object. Eliminating the producer, and therefore the labor, behind the commodity, this relationship explains the alienation many people felt under industrial capitalism. Marx wrote “Since the producers do not come into social contact with each other until they exchange their products, the specific social character of each producer's labor does not show itself except in the act of exchange.” (Marx, 196) This dynamic between producer, consumer, and consumed is the lynchpin in which the disenfranchisement of laborers rests upon. When a consumer can see the labor, which in luxury branding and objects is considered a fault, they will be willing to pay for skilled labor. 

When the consumer cannot see the labor, there is no reason to pay high rates when everything is machine-made, even when the operator is still human. This is further explained in Christopher Berry’s The Idea of Luxury: A Conceptual and Historical Investigation (1994). In this text he looks at how certain objects, materials, and symbols garnered luxury status. He illustrates, “Capitalism has established the ‘material elements’ so that labor can become a need ‘above and beyond necessity’ and as such, it appears no longer as labor but as the full development of activity itself in which natural necessity in its direct form has disappeared; because a historically created need has taken the place of a natural one.” (Berry, 193) Thus, commodity fetishism is exalted in the department store, away from all forms of labor and artisan work, in the mecca of consumption. 

1. Wurts Bros. (New York, N.Y.) [Broadway and East 20th Street. Lord and Taylor, old building.] ca. 1905.
   

Department Stores developed in the mid to late nineteenth century as a form of convenience shopping wrapped in beautiful packaging with superb assistance. Prior to the department store, a woman wanting a new dress would have to stop to buy fabric, trim, thread, and a pattern-- if they were lucky they could send these to a seamstress or dressmaker and they would perform this labor. Many women were not lucky and would have to take on the lengthy process of dressmaking as another form of domestic work. The department store not only centralized all of the bits and bobs of everyday shopping, but also had inhouse seamstresses to tailor ready-to-wear and create couture fashions. The convenience of going to one location, that was also usually outfitted with a restaurant, lounge, and other luxuries, helped women enter the urban sphere as a consumer, a space many women were denied prior to these constructions. 

When shopping, everyone is inevitably going to come across a worker. From the seamstress to the stocker to the cashier, someone is always working within a store. However, when one is strolling the streets of a commercial center for a town or city, there will almost always be a window display. Window trimming as a profession developed after the end of the civil war to keep up with the demands of the middle and upper classes' consumptive habits.  In the same vein, the postbellum period is also where holidays start to develop a commercial capital for stores. Although, gift-giving has always been an important part of holiday seasons, especially ecclesiastical holidays such as Easter and Christmas, Leigh Eric Schmidt explains the commodification of store displays in his article “The Commercialization of the Calendar: American Holidays and the Culture of Consumption, 1870-1930” (1991) A historian of religion, Schmidt focuses on how in which the postindustrial world changed how Americans celebrate and consume during the holidays. From the development of new holidays to a newly booming greeting card business to extravagant window displays, the holidays transformed during the gilded age. 

1. Byron Company (New York, N.Y.). Simpson Crawford Co. 1904. Museum of the City of New York 

In this period, all holidays moved from public, municipal expositions to private, personalized expressions of family piety and prestige. Schmidt exclaims, 

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In the new way of thinking, holidays could provide the orderly timing of consumption, a ritualistic cycle in tune with commerce. Holidays were opportunities. From the industrialist’s vantage point, the economic concern had been to limit as much as possible the number and length of festal celebrations; from the new retailers angle of vision, there could hardly be enough holidays, and merchants began to devise ways of stretching the major ones- Christmas and Easter— into long shopping seasons and the minor ones into week-long sales events. (The Commercialization of the Calendar, 889)

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This industrialization paired with the importance placed upon conspicuous consumption challenged the previously held traditions of the high holidays rendering the papal state to reconfigure their own significance within the calendar. Prior to this period, Easter was celebrated on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox symbolized the resurrection of Jesus in the Christian theology. After a period of 40 days of repentance and sacrifice, namely Lent, Easter Sunday was a day of rejoice and celebration that the long period of winter was coming to a close. According to Sarah K. Hedahl, “Easter stands as the heart of all principle festivals, witnessing to the rationale of the Christian faith.” (Hedahl, 76) She continues “At the core all all Christology is the basic fact that Jesus’s resurrection confirms God has conquered death.” (Hedahl, 78) Easter, within the Catholic and Christian imagination, is the most important holiday due to this ideology of overcoming hardship, challenges, and even death itself. The Church, understanding the shifting culture, uses the commodification of the holiday to create luxurious spectacles of faith to elevate devoutness into a form of conspicuous consumption.

1. United States. Office of War Information.Easter Sunday in front of St. Patrick's. (1906.) Photograph Museum of the City of New York  
   

The Church has always known how to use spatial and decorative motifs to aggrandize spirituality within the followers. Gothic cathedrals of the Medieval period, built in a time when the literacy rate in Europe was low, utilized lofted ceilings, stained glass, and sprawling ambaltories to illuminate the weight and power of God and showcase a form of heaven on Earth. In the gilded age, architects built Neo-Gothic cathedrals in major American cities to both compete with European grandeur and to show off the wealth of patrons. Cathedrals such as Saint Patrick’s (1879), The Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine (1892), and Grace Church (1846) stand as statements within New York City’s landscape. However, no matter how grandiose these cathedrals appeared they could not compete with the department stores springing up around the city. That was until they started to use the Easter mass as a spectacle of exotic and luxurious flora to decorate the already stunning spaces. Leigh Eric Smith, also wrote about this in his article, “The Easter Parade: Piety, Fashion, and Display” (1994). 

The Easter parade, itself a cultural product of consumption, resulted from the commercialization of Easter. After the Church deviated from solemn sermons to commemorate the resurrection, they started to bring in newly harvested and important plants to decorate the cathedrals and entice church goers. Like the window-shoppers, strollers could float down fifth avenue and be sold the idea of luxury consumption but instead of a store it would be the Church. This is coupled with how the culture treated new clothing after the Lenten season. Sumptuousness bookends Lent with Mardi Gras and Easter Sunday. After the period of sacrifice and repentance, followers of God are meant to showcase faith through elegance at the Easter service. Mainly at the Easter Parade that happens prior to and after the mass in which church attenders show off their ‘sunday best’ in a fashion parade down a major street. It is a legend that wearing a new article of clothing will bring good fortune in the year to follow. 

1. World Wide Photos, Inc., Easter Parade. (1905.) Photograph Museum of the City of New York 
   

The New York City fashion parade that rang in springtime, was brought to technicolor in 1948 in the Irving Berlin musical The Easter Parade. Starring Judy Garland as Hannah Brown a young showgirl who does not know her left from right and Fred Astaire as Don Hewes a debonair man in need of a dance partner after Nadine Hale played by Ann Miller leaves him from a solo career, the film follows the year between Brown’s discovery to her eventual engagement on Easter Sunday. The film is a take off of the song of the same name written by Berlin in 1933 after he resurrected a tune from 1917’s “Smile and Show Your Dimple”. Nonetheless, the film opens on Don Hewes as he sings ‘Happy Easter’ and window shops, charming shopgirls and fellow strollers. Throughout the film, the mention of hats is highly important to the holiday celebration. In the opening song, Hewes visits a millinery parlor and seven mannequins try to sell their hats describing why each hat is better than the last. One mannequin even states, ‘this was made for the hat parade on the well known avenue.’ By calling the Easter Parade the ‘hat parade’ even further challenging the religious aspects of the holiday, the model is able to illuminate the prominence of millinery at the turn-of-the-century. 

1. Film Poster for Easter Parade (1948)

2. Film Still from Easter Parade (1948)

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Millinery changed during the latter half of the twentieth century, and despite hats being customary prior to the civil war, they rose to new heights in the postbellum period. Featured below are two hats in need of comparison. First a bonnet from the antebellum period. With a brown straw base and brown gingham ribbon, the hat remains a modest accessory for a respectable lady. One can see Melanie Hamilton from Gone with the Wind (1939) wearing a similar fashion early in the film. In comparison, the hat made by French milliner Madame Georgette made of Leghorn straw, lace, silk velvet, and artificial flowers in 1911 show how the culture of consumption challenged designers to add conspicuous waste to garments.  

1. Unknown Designer (American) Bonnet (1858-1962). Straw. Metropolitan Museum of Art. 

2. Mme Georgette (French, Active 1900-1925) Women’s Hat (1911) Leghorn straw, lace, silk velvet, and artificial flowers. Philadelphia Museum of Art. 

Mme Georgette’s avant garde designs are not without precedence. In fact Dilys E. Blum of the Philadelphia Museum of Art has found the growth in the millinery business from the 1870s to the early 1900s had vast improvement on career women. (Blum, 6) In this period where millinery moved from a seasonal work to a respectable full-time career option, the outlandish designs flourished. From feathers to bows to lace trim and beyond, hat bases were decorated, staged and sold in department stores across Europe and America for the Easter Parade. Many historians such as Marlis Schweitzer, Caroline Evans, and Richard Martin have traced this transatlantic trade of Haute Couture and fashion, but little have focused on the history of millinery. Schmidt briefly mentions, "Women’s parading in Easter millinery served as a subversion of Pauline views about head-coverings as emblematic of female modesty and meekness. The new world of Easter millinery was, in part, about the assertion of the self; about a world of mirrors and studied appearances, about self-transformation through bewitching lines, fabrics, and colors; about the fashioning of the self in a parade of protean styles." (The Easter Parade 155)  However, fails to mention the importance of veiling in the Catholic Church. Prior to Vatican II held in 1966, women were expected to cover their hair within a Church as a form of respect and sacrement. Modesty within Catholicism has long been debated and still has an ongoing discourse. However, using an ostentatious hat to show respect to the Church instead of a veil, handkerchief, or demure headcovering shows that feminism can move thought clothing and the semiotics of dress. 

1. Imported by John Wanamaker Company, Philadelphia & New York (American, active 1876-1995) Women’s Hat (1905). Straw trimmed with silk velvet and artificial flowers. Philadelphia Museum of Art. 

2. Guillard Soeurs (French, Active late 19th and early 20th century) Women Hat (1910) Straw plain weave, straw basket weave, ostrich feathers, silk lace, and cotton flowers and leaves. Philadelphia Museum of Art.

3. Unknown Designer (American) Hat (1910). Silk, feathers, wool. Metropolitan Museum of Art.

In this Veblen’s idea of dress as a form of female punishment is thrown to the wayside. Veblen proclaims, “the high heel, the skirt, the impractical bonnet, the corset, and the general disregard of the wearer’s comfort which is an obvious feature of all civilized women’s appeal, are so many items of evidence to the effect that in the modern civilized scheme of life the woman is still, in theory, the economic dependent of the man.” (120) While yes, the fashion industry, like any industry, is imbued with patriarchal forces due to capitalism, millinery, as outlandish as gilded age hats could be, do not seem to fall under this category. Millinery has always been a business dictated by and for women. If no men befall the line of production from design to consumption can the male gaze still dictate the style? 

One of the most fashionable styles of hat during the gilded age was the Merry Widow. This large brimmed hat typically highly decorated with artificial flowers, feathers, ribbons and more was popularized by style icon Lily Elsie (1886-1962) after her debut in Franz Lehar's operetta The Merry Widow (1905). These hats were fashionable due to their sheer size, and due to the amount of things a designer could place on the hats. "“Beginning in the 1890s and continuing through the first two decades of the twentieth century, theatre managers aggressively pursued the imagination and presence of female theatregoers by transforming the stage into a glorious site of consumer spectacle.” (Schwiezer, 4) Women were dictating their own self-fashioning by being able to not only be consumers in the department stores but also by actively participating in the theatre and other forms of the commercial realm. According to Schwiezer "“On June 13, 1908, thirteen hundred women entered the New Amerstdam Their at Broadway and 42nd Street fro the 275th performance of The Merry Widow, enticed by the promise of a free Merry Widow hat.” (Schwiezer,1) This publicity stunt caused a massive wave and panic throughout the theatre, but demonstrates how important consumption and fashion are in the lives of female participation.

1. Edgar Degas (French, 1834-1917) The Millinery Shop (c. 1879-1886) Oil on Canvas. Art Institute of Chicago. 
   

On the more mercantile end, Wendy Gambler has studied the importance of women in the commercial space through the millinery and dressmaking trade. For many years fashion design and dressmaking became segregated by gender, millinery never seemed to take on this dichotomy. Gambler found, “significantly, most of the women who presided over nineteenth-century dressmaking and millinery shops-- heiress to century-old female craft tradition-- had learned their trades in the workplace, not in the home.” (Gambler, 206) These women-run spaces helped women not only pass down important artisanal skills but also helped women to garner the savvy to run economically viable business models. In the nineteenth century, when women had little economic movement and were mostly seen for their marriability, millinery helped to free women from the shackles of domesticity. However, Gambler does go on to showcase how during the late nineteenth century, with the invention of the department store and haute couture houses, men use power to lessen this trade's importance to alienate women from their craft. Patriarchy will not rest. 

The song ‘Easter Parade’ often changes from iteration to iteration to suit the particular use. However in 2016, Holiday Inn, a stage adaptation of the 1942 film of the same name changes a lyric to read ‘for in my Easter bonnet with all the frills upon it, i'll be the grandest lady in the Easter parade.’ This small change from the man’s admiration for vicariously consuming the woman’s beauty to the woman’s appreciation of herself and her sartorial choices, aid in the real narrative of millinery during the period. The Easter Parade, the event itself, is one for posturing toward the lower classes and flaunting wealth, but it's also about the self-expression of the feminine sphere. In these early fashion parades hear the rumblings of a new world toward creativity, expression, and enfranchisement on the horizon. 

A. Weegee (Arthur Fellig, American, Born Ukrainian, 1899-1968) Two women leave the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem on Easter Sunday (1943) Photograph. Center for photography.

Bibliography and Further Reading

Berry, Christopher. The Idea of Luxury: A Conceptual and Historical Investigation. Cambridge: 

University of Cambridge Press. (1994). Print

Blum, Dilys E. “Ahead of Fashion: Hats of the 20th Century.” Philadelphia Museum of Art 

Bulletin 89, no. 377/378 (1993): 1–48. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3795480 

Gamber, Wendy. “A Gendered Enterprise: Placing Nineteenth-Century Businesswomen in 

History.” The Business History Review 72, no. 2 (1998): 188–217. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3116275 

Hedahl, Susan K. “Easter.” In Proclamation and Celebration: Preaching on Christmas, Easter, 

and Other Festivals, 62–84. 1517 Media, 2012. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt22nm758.8

Leach, William R. “Transformations in a Culture of Consumption: Women and Department 

Stores, 1890-1925.” The Journal of American History 71, no. 2 (1984): 319–42. 

https://www.jstor.org/stable/1901758 

Marx, Karl. “The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof” from Das Kapital: A 

Critique of Political Economy. Chicago :H. Regnery, 1959

McBride, Theresa M. “A Woman’s World: Department Stores and the Evolution of Women’s 

Employment, 1870-1920.” French Historical Studies 10, no. 4 (1978): 664–83. 

https://www.jstor.org/stable/286519 

Schmidt, Leigh Eric. “The Commercialization of the Calendar: American Holidays and the 

Culture of Consumption, 1870-1930.” The Journal of American History 78, no. 3 

(1991): 887–916. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2078795 

Schmidt, Leigh Eric. “The Easter Parade: Piety, Fashion, and Display.” Religion and American 

Culture: A Journal of Interpretation 4, no. 2 (1994): 135–64. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1123847

Schwiezer, Marlis. When Broadway Was the Runaway: Theatre, Fashion, and American Culture. 

Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania. 2011.  ProQuest Ebook Central

Veblen, Thorstein. The Theory of the Leisure Class. Oxford: Oxford University Press: (1899, 

2009). Print.