Growing up, Loralyn Young ’62 heard different versions of her Grandma Lucy, her grandmother’s mother. She was a Pennsylvania-born girl from a large family and for some time was apprenticed to a tailor. She married a homesteader more than 30 years her senior, and was widowed in Kansas with a young child at the age of 35. She later married Civil War veteran John Stevenson and started her second life. Then they moved to Washington where, at the age of 60, Lucy opened her own hat and dressmaking business in Issaquah. From some accounts, she was clever and hardworking. From others, precise and demanding.
Fall fashion week in Pullman featured a stovepipe silhouette and shorter hemline. Black and rhinestones were in, as were gold shoes and feathered cloches.
These weren’t new designs. They were elegant Jazz Age outfits hand-picked by students in a “Costume and Museum Management” class and on display last November in the Terrell Library atrium.
Sophomore Amanda Harris is one of five students who culled through the University’s historic costume collection to decide on a theme and create the 20s in Vogue display. She is one of dozens each year who have the opportunity to dig through an extensive collection of clothing and accessories housed … » More …
There’s more than one way to be Coug, as our gallery of student styles demonstrates. If clothes could talk, they’d speak volumes about the lifestyles and affiliations of their wearers.
And, in fact, they do, according to Linda Arthur, who teaches in Washington State University’s apparel merchandising, design and textiles department. She and Mark Konty, formerly of the sociology department, summed up their students’ research on student subcultures at WSU to see how people were communicating their identity through dress.
Of the 1,200 students and alums surveyed, 65 percent fit into the collegiate subculture. Within that group there are the Greeks, who are well dressed … » More …
While at Washington State College, Carolyn Campbell Schactler of Yakima was a violinist and swimmer in the synchronized group, Fish Fans. She later taught both of these skills, but it was her designing and sewing that launched her career and led to international recognition. Although she graduated with a B.A. in music in 1949, she says, “That wasn’t really my thing. I had been designing and making clothes in my spare moments ever since I can remember. That was really my forte.”
Schactler studied at home and abroad, earning an M.A. from Central Washington University and doing postgraduate work at the University of Texas and … » More …
FLORENCE, ITALY—She’d perused the vintage vendors on London’s Portobello Road and seen the Chanel logo stamped onto the most prestigious silk in the world in Como, Italy.
By her first morning in Florence, with its supple leather, luxury textiles, and elegant, well-heeled locals, Katy Daly’s fingers were getting restless.
“I really need a needle, thread, and some fabric right now,” said Daly, of Kent, Washington. By afternoon, she was winding through the narrow cobblestone alleys in the shadow of Giotto’s bell tower with a small scrap of paper on which she had penciled the word merceria in hopes of finding an Italian haberdashery shop with … » More …
"The more I sewed," says Carol Salusso, "the more I got frustrated with the fact that the patterns didn't fit me." So she began designing her own. » More ...
