Towhead : WE accept by now that designer collections will whip in and out of style with the aerodynamic thrust of a race car running a lap at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. we understand that obsolescence is built in. we may wish at times that things were otherwise; sadly, they arent.
And so, thanks in part to this dispiriting truth of the market, spirits may brighten when we come across a rare item whose existence rebukes the cult of novelty, some fine and simple product that seems never to change.
Who can say when the cherry dress came into being? People here can tell you only that it was always there. For 50 years the cherry dress has been the holiday uniform for the fine-featured towheads at places like the St. Louis Country Club or exclusive Midwestern summer resorts like Harbor Point or Charlevoix, Mich. For 50 years, the cherry dress has been a consistent best seller at the Womans Exchange of St. Louis, a modest nonprofit shop and institution itself about as old as electrification, having opened its doors in 1883.
Come Easter, orders at the store are so strong for cherry dresses that Ellie Dressel, who sews them, says her leg is chained to the sewing machine. Ms. Dressel, a divorced mother who has supported a family and reared a mentally challenged son at home by sewing this one item (450 dresses a year, she said) for nearly a quarter-century, epitomizes the Horatio Alger principles behind the Womans Exchange, which a 19th-century newspaper described as helping those who try to help themselves.
In classic form, the cherry dress is a simple box-pleat frock in white cotton, with a piped Peter Pan collar, a snap closure and four paired cotton cherries, in sewing terminology called yo-yos, stitched on the front.
There are many variants, including a short-pants boys version. a snapshot exists of John F. Kennedy Jr. as a toddler, wearing a cherry jumper from the St. Louis Womans Exchange to accompany his mother to St. Edward Church in Palm Beach, Fla. it is the sort of picture, said Nancy Thomas, the president of the shops volunteer board, that has caused at least one St. Louis man (her husband) to express relief that he never had sons.
WHAT is it about the cherry dress, one may ask? what was it about any of the simple preppy staples that turned into classics, things like penny loafers or blue blazers or button-down shirts?
They functioned so well that people forgot to change them. They were so stylistically generic that, for a very long while, they escaped the tentacles of fashion. They were so reassuringly dowdy that they became background, no small point in a world where people still think that it is one who wears clothes and not the other way around. and they were durable.
Theres a timeless quality to them, and theyre dresses that you hold on to, Carrie Polk, one of four sisters with deep family roots in this river city, said of cherry dresses. three generations in our family have worn them. Theyre like clothes from before the disposable-clothes era, with hems the size of Texas. you didnt just spill chocolate on one and pitch it. you got it cleaned and ironed, and if you grew, you brought down the hem.
A kiddie garment may seem a flimsy thing on which to hang a social history, but the cherry dress is sold in only one place in the world, and that place itself is a historical rarity, perhaps the largest among the remaining outposts of a once – thriving national network of nonprofit exchanges for womens work.
Of scores that existed at the height of the movement, there are now about 20 left, including outposts in Memphis, St. Augustine, Fla., And Brooklyn. the womens exchanges, voluntary social service agencies, originated in 19th-century Philadelphia as places for genteel ladies fallen on hard times to discreetly earn a living without leaving home.
Consignors were originally known as decayed gentlewomen, said the historian Kathleen Sander, whose book, the Business of Charity: the Womans Exchange Movement, 1832-1900, traced the history of a social service federation whose feminist outlines were not always easy to detect behind the chintz-upholstered gentility of the exchanges themselves. Well into the 20th century, society women operated these tearooms and gift shops that sold everything from hand-painted china or smocked christening bonnets to knitted sweaters for dogs. it was the Civil War that propelled the womans exchange movement, by depleting an entire marriageable generation of men, and forcing women of all economic backgrounds to leave home and forge careers. the percentage of unmarried women in the post-bellum period, Ms. Sander noted, was higher then than at any other time in American history.?
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