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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 December 2016
The Herbert Sondheim, Inc. scrapbooks in the New School Archives and Special Collections document the activities of a notable early to mid-20th-century New York-based manufacturer of ready-to-wear women's fashions. A precursor to the contemporary fast fashion industry, Sondheim's employees sketched and kept detailed notes on materials and construction of garments produced by Parisian designers, which the firm then adapted into more affordable and easily obtainable apparel for American consumers. A retrospective visual materials cataloguing project resulting from a graduate student's interest in the collection led to the online availability of over 1200 sketches of fashion adaptations and challenged archives staff to develop appropriate descriptive metadata for a fragmented, ambiguous and complex documentary record.
1. “News and Notes from Parsons,” Alumni, February 1961, 11. It is unknown how the originally reported count of twenty scrapbooks became nineteen. No accession file exists. The Fashion Institute of Technology, State University of New York's Special Collections and Archives also holds records of Herbert Sondheim, Inc., including two scrapbooks and many sketches. It is unclear why the firm's records were dispersed to two institutions instead of remaining a single unit.
2. Secrest, Meryle. Stephen Sondheim: A life. (New York: Knopf, 1998), 4–7 Google Scholar.
3. Sara Idacavage. “A taste for caviar’: national identity ambivalence in American fashion between 1930–1960.” Master's thesis, Parsons The New School for Design, 2014, 41.
4. “Herbert Sondheim, 71, dead; founded couture dress house,” New York Times, 2 August 1966, accessed 28 July 2016, Proquest.
5. For a succinct overview of the relationship between French couturiers and American dress manufacturers, see Buckland's, Sandra Stansbery “Promoting American Designers, 1940–1944: Building Our Own House.” In Twentieth Century Fashion, eds. Welters, Linda and Cunningham, Patricia A. (Oxford: Berg, 2005), 99–122 Google Scholar.
6. Fast fashion may be defined as “a term used to describe cheap and affordable clothes which are the result of catwalk designs moving into stores in the fastest possible way in order to respond to the latest trends” (“Fast Fashion,” MacMillan Dictionary, accessed 26 July 2016 http://www.macmillandictionary.com/us/dictionary/american/fast-fashion). An entire issue of the Journal of Fashion Marketing and Management 10 (2006) is devoted to fast fashion, conceptualized as a strategy rather than a type of clothing.
7. CollectiveAccess. Accessed 28 July 2016. http://collectiveaccess.org/
8. VRA Core. Accessed 28 July 2016. http://core.vraweb.org/
9. Visual Resources Association. Cataloging cultural objects. (Chicago: American Library Association, 2006)Google Scholar.
10. Unlike other metadata schemes, VRA Core 4.0 does not differentiate between creator and contributor. A single creator is not required and, in fact, it is often difficult to identify with any degree of certainty which entity should be assigned primary responsibility for a fashion design visual resource's creation (Cataloging cultural objects, Section 2.1.1.)
11. Miller, Steven J.. Metadata for digital collections. (New York: Neal-Schuman, 2011), 18 Google Scholar.
12. “Herbert Sondheim fashion business scrapbooks.” The New School Archives Digital Collections. Accessed 17 August 2016. http://digitalarchives.library.newschool.edu/index.php/Detail/collections/KA0039
13. In the introduction to Establishing dress history, Lou Taylor observes, “there is no doubt that today the most popular publications are the glamorous accounts of the work of the famous couturiers. It seems as if 90 per cent of books on dress at the start of the new millennium are about the clothes of the two or three hundred women who can afford these garments” (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2004, 1).
14. For discussion and case studies of fashion ecologies, see Maynard, Margaret, “The Fashion Photograph: an ‘Ecology.” In Fashion as Photograph: Viewing and Reviewing Images of Fashion, ed. Shinkle, Eugenie (London: I. B. Tauris, 2008), 54–69 Google Scholar. The “field of cultural production” refers to Pierre Bourdieu's influential The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993)Google Scholar.