Excerpt from Masters Thesis

Perhaps the most widely circulated photograph of Millay is a photograph of her amongst magnolia blossoms wearing a very fashionable tan linen dress. 

In 1914 Arnold Genthe (1869-1942) took this photograph at her publishers house in Mamaroneck, New York. Genthe took many portraits of celebrities over the course of his career. The photo shows Millay in a linen dress with a sailors collar (middy collar), peplum and square buttons down the front. Nancy Milford describes this photo as a “single shot of her standing among the magnolia blossoms [that] would become the blaze that marked an era in American poetry as her own.” (Milford, 2001)

Millay writes about this dress in a letter home: “Wanamaker’s department store sent four women to McGlynn’s parlour to model its spring style, ‘& I have paid $10.50 for a tan linen, tailory, cutey, so becoming, with a white muslin collar, spring dress, that I really need to wear to college.’” (Milford, 2001)

The collar of the dress is worth noting and I believe gives us clues as to its type and social acceptability.  There is a second photo of Millay, at Vassar, in a coat where she is sitting outside. This coat has the same type of sailor's collar as the tan linen dress. Millay began at Vassar in 1913. This type of collar was fashionable and appropriate for college, perhaps it is even the thing that attracted Millay to the dress and the coat. Nancy Milford quotes a classmate of Millay’s talking about how Vassar wasn’t a college for rich girls, “we all wore middies, which were a sort of levelling uniform…” (Milford, 2001) Middies are a type of sailor top. The name deriving from the uniform of the midshipmen in the US Navy, this collar became very popular with school girls, both college and high school. A variation on the middy blouse was the Peter Thompson dress, “Peter Thompson was a tailor in the navy who had taken the middy blouse and added a pleated skirt to it; many private schools for girls eventually adopted it as a uniform.” (Przybyszewski, 2014) Originally from masculine sailors clothing, a middy collar is the type of collar on both the tan linen dress and the coat in the photographs. Millay’s class mate continued, “…Although it is true that one knew, if one were observant, that certain middies were from Wanamaker’s. Or they might be from Filene’s.” (Milford, 2001)

Wannamaker’s Department Store was originally opened in Philadelphia. The store had an organ in it and had several annual sales to increase turnover. Filene’s “instituted a minimum-wage scale for female employees.” Filene’s based out of Boston, expanded to New York City with a store which ran from 1908-2005 called Filene’s Basement that took overflow items and heavily discounted them. Filene’s is lauded as a bargain basement pioneer. From this I surmise Wanamaker’s was higher end that Filene’s.

Millay would have been considered from a lower class. Miriam Gurko states, “It probably never occurred to her to go to college – college was not in the pattern for poor young girls living in little Maine towns.” (Gurko, 1962) Millay’s excitement over this dress and her description for her mother and sisters suggests this dress was important to her. Nancy Milford concludes, “She was a girl who wanted to be beautiful, and well liked and powerful in her class [at Vassar].” (Milford, 2001) With her clothing budget coming from Miss Dow, she was shopping at Wannamaker’s, the more high end of the two department stores. The way she dressed in college was not in line with her social class or background. It was, however, distinguished and very much in style. 

In terms of clothing there was a shift in the 1920’s from making to buying. Peter G. Filene (unable to confirm if there is any relation to the department store) writes, “The thousands of women who daily crowded the new department stores in New York, Philadelphia, and other cities were participating in the trend away from production and towards consumption. By the 1920s, the economic function of housewives was centred largely on what they bought (with their husbands money) rather than on what they made.” (Filene, 1986) In Millay’s case she was not buying anything with her husband's money. She would have bought the tan linen dress with the money Caroline Dow raised for her, and later in life her clothing would have been bought from money she had earned from her writing. It is also clear from letters and diary entries that from childhood into the late 1910s Millay did make some of her own clothes, however it appears that when she had the funds available especially, later in life, she chose to buy her clothes. A reporter for the World-Telegram wrote in 1931, “She buys the latest gowns and frocks and shoes and hats, then retires to her mountain fastness and puts them in closets.” (Milford, 2001) This press example shows that Millay’s “influencing” of the general public was perhaps more towards fashionable feminine dress, for the most part.

Even early in her life, Millay’s choice of clothing often reflected fashionable trends. While her mother was away working as a private nurse Millay would sometimes have friends over. One friend, Ethel Night, recalled Millay opening the door to her house wearing “a blouse of white muslin with cuffs and boned collar made of rows of insertion edged with lace. A full gored skirt came to the top of her buttoned boots; a patent leather belt circumscribed a wide equator around her tiny middle; and a big blue bow spread its wings behind her head with her hair fastened in a ‘bun.’” (Milford, 2001) This event likely took place around 1908 when this kind of romantic ensemble was very fashionable. This shows Millay’s keen interest in being fashionable, even though her family did not have abundant resources. This would have been at the peak popularity of the Gibson Girl. 

The artist and illustrator Charles Dana Gibson, is credited with creating the first national beauty standard for women in America, the Gibson Girl (Fig. 8). These pen and ink illustrations were published widely including in Life Magazine where Gibson was the editor. In Gibson’s illustrations, the Gibson Girl’s clothing is often more suggestive than descriptive. She is usually seen in a full-length, full-gored skirt, sometimes blowing in the wind. She often wears a shirtwaist (sometimes layered with a jacket), or evening gowns. The Gibson Girl silhouette with the large pompadour hair, puffed sleeves and long skirt can be seen on women in photography of the time. The short description of Millay’s outfit described above is no doubt influenced by the Gibson Girl’s standard of feminine beauty.

Later, in 1927, while protesting the Sacco and Vanzetti case, she was photographed wearing very fashionable women’s clothing. Millay seemed to recognize the power of dress, and like many of the women’s rights advocates, chose to dress fashionably and conventionally so as not to take away from their political message. (Ping, 2018)