Demorest, Ellen Curtis (1824–1898)

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Demorest, Ellen Curtis (1824–1898)

Arbiter of American fashion who democratized the availability of smart women's clothing through the development of paper patterns and was a strong supporter of women's achievements in business. Name variations: Nell Curtis; Mme. Demorest. Pronunciation: Dem-OR-est. Born Ellen Louise Curtis on November 15, 1824, in Schuylerville, Saratoga County, New York; died on August 10, 1898; daughter of Henry D. (a successful hat manufacturer) and Electa (Abel) Curtis; attended Schuylerville Academy; married William Jennings Demorest, on April 15, 1858; children: William Curtis (b. 1859) and Evelyn Celeste Caradora Louise (b. 1865).

Set up a millinery shop in Schuylerville and prospered (1843); moved her business to millinery center in Troy, NY, and eventually to New York City (1844); began distributing paper patterns and founded a quarterly fashion catalog Mirror of Fashions of which shewas editor (1860); continued publishing special fashion publications while the magazine appeared under various titles—Demorest's Illustrated Monthly and Mme. Demorest's Mirror of Fashions (1865–77), Demorest's Monthly Magazine (1878–89), Demorest's Family Magazine (1899–99); shifted editorial duties to sons (1882); founded, with other women professionals, the woman's club Sorosis (1868); established, with Susan King, the Woman's Tea Company to import tea to be sold by gentlewomen (1872); received patents for elevator shaft floor and dress improvements such as the Imperial Dress Elevator, a method of raising a long skirt while walking; won many awards at international expositions and at the Philadelphia Centennial (1876).

When young Nell Curtis was growing up at Old Saratoga, known as Schuylerville, in Saratoga County, New York, the area boasted a dual fame as revolutionary battleground and health spa. Half a century earlier, the surrender there of the British general John Burgoyne had been a turning point for the patriots during the American Revolution; long before that, the healing waters of the local springs had been a gathering place of the Mohawk tribe of Native Americans, and in 1767, when the pre-revolutionary British superintendent of Indian Affairs, the Hon. Sir William Johnson was introduced to them by tribal members, these "Medicine Waters of the Great Spirit" had entered colonial legend. By the 1820s, what Cleveland Amory has described as the "king" of the Northern watering holes, had become a fashionable resort. There the seemingly contradictory influences of patriotic history and the anti-democratic show of extravagance in the fashions of the resort town all played a part in the development of Ellen Curtis Demorest as fashion "interpreter" and designer, who attained international fame, and was considered, according to Russell Lynes, to be a prime cultural asset to America and one of the wonders of her age.

In childhood, Nell's interest in fashion was awakened by the annual arrival of visitors for the bathing and healing powers of the waters of Saratoga Springs. Watching the arrivals was a way of life for the natives who flocked to see the notable members of society, described by Edna Ferber in her novel Saratoga Trunk, as they stepped off the train. The travelers arrived from Southern plantations and seaboard cities alike, and according to a column that appeared in Demorest's Monthly Magazine in 1865, "For a few weeks or months, these ordinarily dull and commonplace villages and hamlets … present the spectacle of a grand reunion of wealth, fashion, and beauty out of doors."

Nell Curtis was the second of eight children—six girls and two boys—born to Henry D. and Electa Abel Curtis . According to histori an Ishbel Ross , the families of both parents had settled in the region at the time of the American Revolution. Nell's father was a farmer and owner of a men's hat factory, able to provide well for his family; they lived in a comfort able home. After at tending a local school and Schuylerville Academy, Nell set up a millinery shop, with the help of her father, and, after a prosperous year, she moved to Troy, New York, a leading millinery center, and later to the borough of Brooklyn in New York City.

In 1858, Nell was 34 when she married William Jennings Demorest, a dry-goods merchant and widower with two children, in what was soon to be a formidable business partnership. As Mme. Demorest, the former milliner was to challenge the status of Paris as the center of fashion and, in the process, become an international phenomenon. Her sister Kate Curtis was also an important part of the family business team.

As the story is told, the seeds of their great success were sown when the new Mrs. Demorest was watching a maid cut out a dress from a crude brown-paper pattern. Because she and her sister Kate had been working on simplifying their system, watching the maid cut around the paper gave Nell the idea of accurate, mass-produced paper patterns. However, Caroline Bird refutes the idea that using paper pattern pieces as guide for cloth originated with the Demorests' maid. (Woman's magazine historian Helen Woodward claims the same story for the Buttericks.) Kate and Nell had been working on a dress chart that "would simplify the cumbersome and expensive cut-and-try method of making clothes fit," writes Bird. With their chart and simplified designs, the sisters did foresee the potential in selling the design of a garment separate from the garment itself. According to Bird, the system of paper patterns they devised was to be as American as the elitist couturiers were French, bringing aristocratic styles and cuts to all kinds of women. It was both an ingenious accomplishment and a contribution worthy of a democratic society.

William Demorest, who had both a talent for promotion and a willingness to support the work of the two, was quick to see the potential in Nell and Kate's ideas. Typical of his promotional abilities were his links to tours made by Jenny Lind . When Lind toured the United States, she wore fashions donated by Demorest's Emporium.

By 1860, the paper patterns were being sold and publication of the quarterly fashion catalog Mirror of Fashions had begun, with Ellen Demorest as editor; the magazine proved to be a way of promoting a number of Demorest products. Some historians maintain that the goal of the magazine was to encourage home sewing, using the patterns stapled inside, and to build a network of local distribution agencies to sell the pattern; historian Frank Luther Mott, however, in his multivolume history of American magazines, looks upon the pattern as a kind of premium to sell the magazine. Whichever viewpoint is more valid, the fashion sense of Ellen Curtis Demorest was the key to both, and the combined venture was highly successful.

Parents, teach your daughters some remunerative business. Select for them as you do for your sons—according to natural or apparent capability.
—Ellen Curtis Demorest

With her sister Kate, Demorest was able to adapt foreign styles into patterns and made samples available at an establishment on Broadway. At the height of her success, her fashion patterns could reach farm wives before they were available to the Paris elite. According to Lynes, of all the "firms that made and scattered patterns abroad, none could hold a candle to Mme. Demorest's Emporium of Fashion in New York. It was the soul of elegance." Her biannual fashion openings at the Emporium were perfectly timed and became social events of the first order. On the labor end of the business, she hired blacks to work on the same terms as whites long before integration was generally considered acceptable, and minority employees were welcome on equal terms at gala occasions at the Emporium.

In 1860, the Demorests hired Jane Cunningham Croly for their new Mirror of Fashions. Croly, who wrote under the pen name Jennie June, was recently returned from Rockford, Illinois, where she and her husband David had attempted to start a newspaper. (Ishbel Ross wrote a combined biographical study of Croly and Demorest in Crusades and Crinolines.) Because Croly was the one writing about the beginnings of the women's club movement in New York City, she is frequently credited with an organizing impulse that by all rights should be shared with a number of other New York women professionals, including Fanny Fern (whose copy was more precious to publisher Robert Bonner than that of Henry Ward Beecher or Alice Cary ). In the founding of the Sorosis woman's club, Nell Demorest was another of the organizers, and Ross gives an account of the famous 1868 meeting at Delmonico's, at which men of the press club were wined and dined but not allowed to speak. That night Nell Demorest gave a toast to "Man, the Monopolizer," reminding her audience that daughters, like sons, could inherit good qualities from their father, and then discussed the problem of a woman's services being recognized as a duty owed and subject to the caprice of her spouse. Further, according to Demorest, "Men have monopolized the right to declaim, lecture, preach, do public speaking, and women wound up with no experience that might be useful," adding that we should not wonder if our daughters learn to smile at suggestions of extravagance of dress. "She is none the poorer for the outlay, for ordinarily a wife owns only her wardrobe."

Nell Demorest also found it outrageous that some considered it a disgrace for women to work. In 1870, in a column in her magazine, she pointed out that useful, compensated labor affords the only means of independence and of physical, mental, and moral growth. "Men have learned the lesson long ago—no man is respectable, in the highest sense, who is an idler," she asserted, adding that a few working women couldn't force change but women by the thousands could strike at and annihilate the foundation of the false system created by women as a dependent class.

Although the columns of Croly as Jennie June are more consistently strident, Nell Demorest frequently made strong statements about the employment of women working and the need for them to learn how to be independent. She also took firm stands on child and wife abuse, on questions of prison reform and the treatment of the insane, and she was an advocate for the work of Dorothea Dix . She applauded Queen Margaret of Savoy (1851–1925) who had a woman on her staff of personal physicians, and she criticized Queen Victoria for her unfriendliness to women doctors. According to the Dictionary of Literary Biography, the columns of Jennie June were primarily a forum for the Demorest reform philosophies. Clearly, the long, close working relationship between Demorest and Croly demonstrates that they held similar goals for women.

According to Ross, Demorest was an impressive figure, tall and erect, with dark hair, a high forehead, and aquiline features. In addition to presiding over an international pattern empire, she was particularly proud of the highly successful purchasing bureau, run primarily by her husband, to fill mail orders for all kinds of merchandise, a forerunner of the modern catalog business. Success in this area allowed him to speculate successfully in Manhattan real estate, and his additional publishing ventures resulted eventually in the management of five separate periodicals with a combined circulation of over one million.

Demorest's first child, William Curtis, was born the year after her marriage; a daughter Evelyn was born in 1865. William's two children by his previous marriage were Henry and Vienna. In the years that her children were young, Mme. Demorest, as she became known professionally, divided her time between the Emporium and her home. The family maintained a country place at Claremont, in northern Manhattan, but Saratoga also lured her back during the summers for a quieter life at the old Curtis homestead, where gardening and music were two of the family's primary interests.

According to Ross, the Demorests reached their peak during the 1870s, when they had agents all over the U.S., and their son Henry ran an office in Paris. In 1865, the Mirror of Fashion had become a general magazine, Demorest's Illustrated Monthly and Mme. Demorest's Mirror of Fashions, and continued under this long and cumbersome title until 1877 when it was simplified to Demorest's Monthly Magazine. Each issue included a tissue-paper pattern and hand-colored plates describing the fashions and how to make them. Illustrations of children's clothes and hats and accessories such as purses were also included, with instructions, along with architectural drawings, sheet music, lithographs of famous people, and poetry and fiction by famous writers. By 1882, its lineup of published women writers included Julia Ward Howe, Martha J.R. Lamb, Margaret Sangster (1838–1912), and Louisa May Alcott .

Demorest further enlarged the field of employment for women with her system of "agents" for the magazines and with the Woman's Tea Company, started in 1872. According to Ross, the agents were very successful, while the latter enterprise, undertaken with Susan A. King , a New Yorker who had been successful in real estate, enjoyed a modest success. King made trips to the Orient to select the teas and to negotiate with growers and exporters, traveling on a clipper ship renamed the Madam Demorest.

In 1874, when New York businesses were generally failing, the Demorests continued to do well, and their showrooms and work studios were moved from three houses on Broadway to a fine old mansion at 17 E. 14th Street. According to Ross, their businesses had increased 15-fold in four years and two million patterns were mailed each year. In 1876, the year of the Philadelphia Centennial (where Demorest was awarded top honors in fashion), three million patterns were distributed through 1,500 agencies. At a time when dress reform was a popular issue and proponents were opposed to the inclusion of highfashion ladies' clothing in the women's displays, the patterns remained successful anyway. In the next decade, however, this portion of the Demorest empire went into decline, in part due to the swamping effect of competition from Ebenezer Butterick, who had secured a patent on patterns for men's clothing that he began to distribute. In 1887, Demorest withdrew from the pattern business, and it was sold.

In 1885, William had retired to devote himself to the temperance movement and ran that year for lieutenant governor of New York on the Prohibition ticket; he was the Prohibition candidate for mayor of New York City in 1890 and died in 1895. Nell Demorest had meanwhile suffered a stroke and was an invalid. She moved into the Hotel Renaissance in New York where she died three years later of a cerebral hemorrhage, at age 73; she was buried in Kensico Cemetery in Valhalla, New York.

It is difficult to determine which Demorest was the real inventor; the pages of their magazines are full of ingenious devices and products—a spiral-spring bosom pad, a combination suspender and shoulder brace, special complexion cremes, fragrances, and the Imperial Dress Elevator. According to patent historian Anne Macdonald , Ellen Demorest invented, but did not patent, an inexpensive hoop skirt that won many prizes, and she did patent a few items, including an elevator shaft floor, a "puff" for arranging hair, and a dress improvement called the Imperial Dress Elevator, which raised a long skirt while walking. Although William patented most of his gadgets, neither he nor Ellen patented the paper pattern. Because of this, they were unable to establish their priority in court, even though they had been the first to put them on the market. Their success with them was phenomenal, nonetheless.

Like many outstanding women of her era, Ellen Curtis Demorest has been supplanted by the more political heroines of the suffrage movement; nonetheless, she was a heroine to many of her contemporaries. She is remembered for introducing international fashion sense and know-how to grassroots America. Her publications initiated simplified instructions for creating fashionable looks with products designed to ease the demands on time and money for being well-dressed. As a "fashion arbiter," she adapted couture to clean, modern lines available through her well-fitted and easy-to-use paper patterns, and she "Americanized" high fashion for anyone who could read.

sources:

Bird, Caroline. Enterprising Women. NY: W.W. Norton, 1976.

Ferber, Edna. Saratoga Trunk. Greenwich, CT: Fawcett, 1972.

James, Edward T., Janet Wilson James, and Paul S. Boyer. Notable American Women: A Biographical Dictionary. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University.

Lynes, Russell. The Tastemakers: The Shaping of American Popular Taste. NY: Harper, 1955.

Macdonald, Anne L. Feminine Ingenuity: How Women Inventors Changed America. NY: Ballantine, 1992.

Mott, Frank Luther. A History of American Magazines, 1865–1885. Vol. III. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1938.

Riley, Sam G., ed. American Magazine Journalists, 1850-1900. Vol. 79 of the Dictionary of Literary Biography. Detroit, MI: Gale Research, 1989.

Ross, Ishbel. Crusades and Crinolines: The Life and Times of Ellen Curtis Demorest and William Jennings Demorest. NY: Harper and Row, 1963.