The Postcard
A postally unused postcard with a divided back that was published by Hinodo-Shoko of Seoul.
Although the card was not posted, the following was typed in capital letters across the divided back:
"Property of Ethel H. Traphagen"
Ethel H. Traphagen
Cassidy Zachary has written the following about Ethel Traphagen in The Fashion Studies Journal:
'Ethel had worked in the fashion industry for almost ten years as a fashion illustrator, designer, and teacher when she won the coveted first-place “Evening Dress” award in the New York Times contest.
A New York City native born in 1882, Ethel graduated high school and studied art at the National Academy of Design before embarking on her career in fashion in 1904. Her many employers over her formative years included Vogue and Dress Magazine (later Vanity Fair), Macy’s, Bloomingdale’s and Lord & Taylor, as well as the custom-import houses Thurn and Mademoiselle Jacqueline.
At six feet tall, the red-haired, blue-eyed Ethel presented a striking presence with an ambition to match. In 1907, Ethel’s friend, artist and dancer Paul Swan, told some of their mutual friends:
“You are stars—you merely twinkle.
Miss Traphagen and I are comets—
we shall leave a path in the sky.”
For her, education was key. Her own early career was fraught with difficulty and self-described “heart-ache,” as she lacked any formal training, and had to learn the trade through trial and error.
In an effort to impart her knowledge and experience to future professionals, she took a series of teaching jobs beginning in 1911. By 1912, she was teaching at two schools and running the fashion design and illustration departments at two others.
Design-by-adaptation was at the core of Ethel’s design and teaching methods. Interviewed by the New York Times in 1913 about her winning design, Ethel expounded upon her beliefs that original American design could be achieved by looking to art and fashion history as sources of inspiration.
Ethel embraced these tenets in her winning dress design, which she based on the painting Nocturne: Blue and Gold, Old Battersea Bridge by James Abbott McNeil Whistler.
The contest's judges commented:
“In its very architectural expression,
the gown represents the piers of the
bridge in the foreground of Whistler’s
exquisite Nocturne, while in her use
of the silvery gray putty color, the
yellow beads, the restrained use of
the effective red, she has worked out
a perfect harmony of color with a
decided artistic feeling and a marked
cleverness of technique.”
After almost a decade in the industry, Ethel began to envision an American fashion system that worked independently of French influence.
Throughout the 1910's, Ethel used her industry connections to bring nationwide attention to her students’ work, and their illustrations were featured in newspapers and magazines across the country.
In 1920 and 1922, Ethel organized and staged two Cooperative Fashion Exhibitions in conjunction with industry professionals. After the 1920 exhibition, one New York Times headline asked:
“Is America to Have a Fashion Art?
Display of Domestic Designs in
Gowns, Coats, and Negligees
Gives Promise for Future.”
The publicity and success of these ventures fueled Ethel’s determination and in 1923, she opened the Traphagen School of Co-operative Fashion (later Traphagen School of Fashion), one of the first schools dedicated solely to training students for professional careers as fashion designers and illustrators.
The school opened in a small room in the Bryant Park Studio Building at 80 West 40th. Street, New York City, in September of 1923, with only seven students.
Under Ethel’s tutelage and constant promotion, the school grew and prospered—it relocated to bigger facilities twice within its first two years, and finally settled at 1680 Broadway.
Initially the school only offered courses in design and illustration, but by the early 1930's, it had expanded to include departments in Construction (1931), Theatrical Design (1932), and Millinery.
There was also a Commercial Textile Studio (1932) and a Design Service—both marketed students’ designs to industry professionals that included Cheney Brothers, Warner Brothers, and the Cotton Textile Institute.
It was not uncommon for a manufacturer to purchase a student’s design after seeing it modeled in one of the school’s annual fashion shows.
The school’s facilities boasted a 7,000-volume library—with books on everything from fashion design and illustration, costume and art history, to original 18th. and 19th.-century periodicals—as well as a museum.
Largely acquired by Traphagen herself, the Traphagen Museum’s collection comprised thousands of garments and accessories, ranging from the seventeenth-century to contemporary ethnographic materials.
One of the highlights was a suit owned by the nineteenth-century Bavarian king Ludwig II, which was embellished with 80,000 pearl seeds.
The school’s library and museum were direct manifestations of the design ideology Traphagen imparted to her students: design by adaptation. Ethel expounded upon the practice in numerous published articles throughout her career, as well as in her book Costume Design and Illustration, published in 1918 and reprinted in 1932.
Ethel’s quests for new sources of design inspiration for her students took her around the world. In 1928, she accompanied her husband, the well-known painter William R. Leigh, on an expedition to Africa, and returned with a large collection of African chests, dolls, costumes, and jewelry.
In 1929, she partnered with the textile manufacturer C. K. Eagle and Co. on an unprecedented campaign to market her students’ African-inspired textile designs to American consumers. Ethel wrote:
“This was the first occasion on
which there was a practical tie-up
of inspirational design done in an
American school with the
manufacturer of textiles and the
retailer.”
The designs were widely publicized in what came to be known as the “Zanbaraza” campaign, and were sold in the department store Arnold Constable.
In its January 1930 edition, the American Silk Journal featured pictures of the textiles in an article entitled “Original Motifs for Spring.” The article’s author heralded the Zanbaraza prints as “one of the most unique lines of silk prints ever produced in the United States,” and credited Ethel with starting a “major fashion movement”:
Ethel Traphagen saw in this major fashion movement the beginning of the end of our habitual limiting of ourselves to the designs from Paris. To Miss Traphagen, a slavish dependence upon Europe for design was the most senseless and intolerable condition in current American art.
Only one month prior to the article—and campaign’s debut—Ethel wrote a scathing letter to the editor of the New York Times entitled, “Fighting the New Fashions,” in which she lambasted the “French style factory.”
In 1929, while Ethel was busy planning the Zanbaraza collaboration, American Vogue declared higher waistlines and longer skirts as the latest word in Parisian chic, shunning the shapeless shifts of the 1920's. In her letter, Ethel vehemently denounced the new Paris fashions and criticized American women for following them sheepishly:
"One great good the World War accomplished
was to free women from the curse of stupidity
in the matter of clothes, and now comes this
effort to set women back a century.
These atrocities…are ground sweeping filth
collectors, dragging the germs from the streets
into the home and defeating the best sanitary
efforts of the twentieth century.
It is an everlasting shame that civilization has
no adequate weapon to combat this many-
headed beast—French fashion—that is trying
to exercise a more complete tyranny than any
monarch the world has ever known.”
Ethel’s reaction was understandable, albeit a little extreme. She feared the new styles meant a return to oppressive fashions that harkened back to the 1900's when women, including herself, wore restrictive steel-boned corsets to achieve the fashionable silhouette of the day.
Ethel greatly valued the comfort and simplicity of the “simple corset-free costume” of the 1920s, which she considered “the best that women had worn during civilized history.”
To Ethel, the longer skirts were not only unsanitary, they were obstructive to women’s freedom of movement in the busy modern world, a world that she herself navigated on a daily basis.
Ethel was the epitome of a modern woman. A photograph from 1921 that accompanied an article that appeared soon after her marriage captured the pride of a woman confident in herself and her independence.
The statuesque Ethel is pictured wearing a safari suit, complete with trousers—one of the many ways she defied traditional gender roles. The article was entitled:
“Lives Next Door to Hubby:
Artist Bride Tells Why.”
The article highlighted Ethel as the pinnacle of feminist virtue—she and her husband lived in separate but adjacent residences, and she maintained her maiden name in public because of its association with her successful career.
Ethel’s adoption of trousers in the 1910's and 20's earned her the title of "The Woman who Pioneered Pants.”
In a 1932 the New York Times published an article entitled:
“See Fashion Centre Moving to
America—Miss Traphagen Says
Transfer from Paris Logical—
Nation Prepared for Change.”
In the article Ethel once again expressed her confidence in American designers:
“Once awakened, America will show
her capacity for organization, and
American designs and American
designers will be accepted and
featured as they should be.”
Unapologetically outspoken and passionately determined, Ethel’s tireless advocacy for American designs contributed to their recognition.
When American designers finally won public acceptance and respect in the late 1930's and during World War II, the Traphagen School of Fashion was New York’s leading fashion institution.
In 1941, New York Times fashion editor Virginia Pope declared New York City:
"The Fashion Center of the World.”
Ethel had found validation.
In order to celebrate the advancement of American fashion designers to a place of recognition and respect, Ethel began the publication of the Fashion Digest in 1937.
A groundbreaking publication, the quarterly subscription magazine was dedicated exclusively to American fashion, with an emphasis on past and present Traphagen students.
As editor and publisher until her death in 1963, Ethel’s influence was strongly felt throughout the pages infused with fashion, costume, art, poetry, history, and even astrology.
The Fashion Digest is key to solidifying the far-reaching success of the school and Ethel’s efforts throughout the years, as it featured the names of students who went on to achieve huge success in the fashion industry.
Traphagen alumni include many of America’s most celebrated fashion designers such as James Galanos, Mollie Parnis, Vera Neumann, Geoffrey Beene, and Anne Klein.
Ethel's efforts were undoubtedly instrumental in bringing the work of American designers to the fore, with her legacy alive and well in today’s thriving American fashion industry.
Ethel Traphagen died on the 29th. April 1963 at the age of eighty—fifty years after she won the New York Times contest, and forty years after opening her groundbreaking school.
Tens of thousands of students from around the world attended the Traphagen School of Fashion before the school closed its doors in 1991, sixty-eight years after it first opened.
The school’s success throughout Ethel’s lifetime and long after are a testament to the power of one woman’s unwavering vision and hard work.
She was responsible for training a new generation of American fashion designers and industry professionals at a time dominated by the dictates of Paris fashion.
Today, Ethel’s name and contributions have all but fallen into obscurity—the prolific school forgotten in the face of other successful institutions that continue to thrive, such as the Fashion Institute of Technology and Parsons School of Design.
However thanks to the proliferation of digitized newspapers from across the country, Ethel’s far-reaching influence—in a career spanning almost sixty years—can again be brought to the fore. No longer forgotten, Ethel can now be recognized as the pioneer of American fashion design that she was.'
How Japan Took Control of Korea
Erin Blakemore has written the following for history.com in 2018, and updated it in 2023:
In 1910, Korea was annexed by the Empire of Japan after years of war, intimidation and political machinations; the country would be considered a part of Japan until 1945. In order to establish control over its new protectorate, the Empire of Japan waged an all-out war on Korean culture.
Schools and universities forbade speaking Korean, and emphasized manual labor and loyalty to the Emperor. Public places adopted Japanese, too, and an edict to make films in Japanese soon followed.
Topographical and other postcards of Korea were published with descriptions in Japanese text.
It also became a crime to teach history from non-approved texts, and authorities burned over 200,000 Korean historical documents, essentially wiping out the historical memory of Korea.
During the occupation, Japan took over Korea’s labor and land. Nearly 100,000 Japanese families settled in Korea with the land they had been given; they chopped down trees by the million and planted non-native species, transforming a familiar landscape into something many Koreans didn’t recognize.
Nearly 725,000 Korean workers were made to work in Japan and its other colonies, and as World War II loomed, Japan forced hundreds of thousands of Korean women into life as “comfort women”—sexual slaves who served in military brothels.
Korea’s people weren’t the only thing that was plundered during Japan’s colonization—its cultural symbols were considered fair game, too. One of the most powerful symbols of Korean sovereignty and independence was its royal palace, Gyeongbokgung, which was built in Seoul in 1395 by the mighty Joseon dynasty.
Soon after assuming power, the Japanese colonial government tore down over a third of the complex’s historic buildings, and the remaining structures were turned into tourist attractions for Japanese visitors.
As historian Heejung Kang notes, the imperial government also attempted to preserve treasures of Korean art history and culture—but then used them to uphold imperial Japan’s image of itself as a civilizing and modern force.
This view of Korea as backward and primitive compared to Japan made it into textbooks, museums and even Koreans’ own perceptions of themselves.
The occupation government also worked to assimilate Koreans with the help of language, religion and education. Shinto shrines originally intended for Japanese families became places of forced worship.
Historian Donald N. Clark explains:
"The colonial government made Koreans
worship the gods of imperial Japan,
including dead emperors and the spirits
of war heroes who had helped them
conquer Korea earlier in the century.”
This forced worship was viewed as an act of cultural genocide by many Koreans, but for the colonists, it was seen as evidence that Koreans and Japanese were a single, unified people.
Though some families got around the Shinto edict by simply visiting the shrines and not praying there, others grudgingly adopted the new religious practices out of fear.
By the end of its occupation of Korea, Japan had even waged war on people’s family names. At first, the colonial government made it illegal for people to adopt Japanese-style names, ostensibly to prevent confusion in family registries.
But in 1939, the government made changing names an official policy. Under the law, Korean families were “graciously allowed” to choose Japanese surnames.
At least 84 percent of all Koreans took on the names since people who lacked Japanese names were not recognized by the colonial bureaucracy, and were shut out of everything from mail delivery to ration cards. Historian Hildi Kang writes:
“The whole point was for the government
to be able to say that the people had
changed their names ‘voluntarily.’”
The Plundering of Korea by Japan
(a) Historic Korean Artifacts
Koreans accuse the Japanese of plundering hundreds of thousands of ancient Korean artifacts, mostly during their 36-year occupation of the peninsula. Most Japanese consider the issue a dead one, resolved by the 1965 Japan-Korea Treaty, which led to the return of some 1,400 items.
However the treaty was not definitive, as it neglected artifacts in Japanese private collections, as well as those originating in North Korea.
The size of the haul is astounding. Eighty percent of all Korean Buddhist paintings are believed to be in Japan. And, says Seoul art historian Kwon Cheeyun:
"35,000 Korean art objects and
30,000 rare books have been
confirmed to be there, too."
However that is only the tip of the iceberg: vastly more is believed to be hidden away in private collections.
Determining legal ownership is far more difficult than with the art looted by the Nazis. Toshiyuki Kono, a law professor at Kyushu University. states:
"It's almost impossible to trace the
provenance of centuries-old artifacts."
Besides, the Japanese annexation was internationally recognized in 1910, meaning that relocating Korean artifacts within "Japanese territory" was lawful at the time.
To Korea's annoyance, Japan holds many items of particular value. More than 1,000 bronze, gold and celadon pieces owned by the late businessman Takenosuke Ogura now make up the core of the Tokyo National Museum's Korean section.
A lot of precious Korean artifacts are now owned by private Japanese citizens or organizations, which means that the Japanese government can’t just acquire them and hand them back to Korea. So, unless the Korean government offers to actually spend millions of dollars to buy back the artifacts, it is unlikely they will ever be returned.
As well as removing cultural artifacts to Japan, the Japanese also burned countless Korean government buildings and palaces.
(b) Natural Resources
The Japanese also removed vast amounts of Korea's natural resources, including lumber, rice, coal, iron ore and many other minerals.
The land itself was also appropriated by the Japanese; by 1910 an estimated 8% of all arable land in Korea had come under Japanese control. This ratio increased steadily, and by 1932, the ratio of Japanese land ownership had grown to 53%.
Japanese landlords included both individuals and corporations. Many former Korean landowners became tenant farmers, having lost their entitlements almost overnight because they could not pay for the land reclamation and irrigation improvements forced upon them. As often occurred in Japan itself, tenants had to pay over half their crop in rent.
