Despite the built-in obsolescence of fashion, its greatest inventions live on and on.
But who can take full credit for blue jeans, the T-shirt, the trenchcoat or the classic white shirt?
“I’m always suspicious of the inventor of an important vernacular garment,” said Valerie Steele, executive director at the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology. “Like we could say that Levi Strauss made a lot of money from blue jeans, but he didn’t really invent blue jeans.”
In fact, there aren’t any fashion designers among the inductees in the National Inventors Hall of Fame. To retrace the origins of some of fashion’s most lasting garments and accessories, WWD spoke with Steele and two other prominent historians: Caroline Stevenson, the London College of Fashion’s head of cultural and historic studies, and Elizabeth Semmelhack, the Bata Shoe Museum’s creative director and senior curator.