patrickhumphreys: Tina Leser Mexican cotton shirt and denim jeans, photographed by John Rawlings fo

patrickhumphreys:

Tina Leser Mexican cotton shirt and denim jeans, photographed by John Rawlings for Harper’s Bazaar, 1951.

A cute, teenager outfit of turned-up, denim jeans and striped cotton shirt epitomizes the freshness of American fashion after the Second World War. Tina Leser was among the new wave of designers unique to American culture who concentrated on sportswear as fashion. Her clothes, designed for a manufacturer (until 1952 when she formed her own company), were informed by everyday shapes such as play-suits, sarong dresses, smocks, swimsuits and shrug-on jackets, but they were almost always influenced by a more formal aesthetic, as is evident in the picture shown here. Leser’s mother was a painter and the designer studied art, painting, design and sculpture in Philadelphia and Paris. Leser moved to Honolulu and opened a boutique in 1935, moving to New York in 1942. During the 1950s she designed cropped and harem pants before any other designers; she is also thought to have been the first designer to make dresses from cashmere.

—Phaidon Editors, 1998