The Editorial Eye: Clippings from the Cashin Archive
Among Cashin’s thousands of pages of editorial clippings, her appearances in Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar alone offer a comprehensive visual summary of her design work from the 1930s through the 1980s. She first appeared in the magazines in 1938, and for the next forty years she was regularly featured on their pages. Both magazines were central to her success. In 1938, it was Harper’s Bazaar editor Carmel Snow who “discovered” Cashin and brought her to the attention of her first Seventh Avenue manufacturer, Adler & Adler. In 1953, Cashin hand-carried her new black leather great coat, designed for Sills and Co., to the Vogue offices. Featured on a full page, Cashin credited this one “well-placed and well-shot” photo with catapulting her name and designs in leather into the public eye.
As a young girl, Cashin loved flipping through the pages of the “the fashion books” in her mother’s dressmaking shop. Throughout her childhood, she illustrated untold numbers of fashion designs based on those she saw in the magazines. This selection of images culled from Cashin’s personal scrapbooks is introduced by Cashin’s adolescent drawing of a Vogue cover, a clear indication of her early dreams to become a part of the fashion world.
