Bonnie Cashin

Bonnie Cashin usually gets grouped with Claire McCardell as one of the women who invented American sportswear, and that's right, but her 1940s are much stranger and more interesting than McCardell's steady rise. She spent the middle of the decade in Hollywood, dressing movie stars, and only came back to ready-to-wear at the very end of it.

She grew up in California, the daughter of a dressmaker, and was designing costumes for dance and stage shows while still very young. In 1937 she moved into ready-to-wear with the New York coat and suit firm Adler & Adler, where she was already designing practical clothes for a woman who moved around a lot. In 1943 she left for Hollywood, signing with 20th Century Fox, and spent the next six years designing costumes for dozens of films, including Laura (1944), Anna and the King of Siam (1946), and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945). Film costume taught her things that fed straight into her later work: how a garment reads in movement, how to dress a character rather than a mannequin, and how to research historical and regional dress.

That research habit is one of her signatures. Cashin was fascinated by clothing from around the world - ponchos, kimonos, Chinese jackets, Indian dress - and by working clothes, and she borrowed their shapes freely. She thought in terms of a woman's whole life rather than a single outfit: pieces that layered on top of one another, came off as the day warmed up, and packed flat for travel. That idea of "layering," which she was one of the first to articulate clearly as a design principle, came together in the late 1940s.

In 1949 she left Hollywood and returned to Adler & Adler in New York, and her first collections there won her a Coty Award in 1950. Leather, suede, canvas, toggles, and brass hardware - the details she's best known for, and the ones that led to her famous handbags for Coach in the 1960s - belong to the decades after. But the thinking behind them was formed in the 1940s, in wartime Hollywood, among costume racks and research files. I like her as a reminder that the rise of American fashion in these years wasn't only about New York's garment district - some of its best ideas came from the West Coast, and from the movies.