Fashion in 1910’s Greenwich Village

In the 1910’s — a period known as “the Greenwich Village Renaissance,” when a great flowering a radical political, cultural, and artistic ferment emerged took root this neighborhood — a new fashion trend also emerged from the bohemian subculture of Greenwich Village. Women began cutting their hair, removing their corsets, and wearing loose fitting clothes like tunics, smocks, and caftans. This new type of dress was cultivated in the vibrant progressive spaces of Greenwich Village where feminist thought and feminist thinkers could come together to connect, learn, and agitate for change.

Groups like the Heterodoxy Club, a forum for women to discuss and develop tactics of progressive feminism, held meetings in the neighborhood. In fact, many members of Heterodoxy became fashion icons, known for their unconventional dress and rejection of gendered norms.

Henrietta Rodman, a prominent member of Heterodoxy, was an early icon for feminist, or “reform fashion,” known for her billowing gowns and short bob haircut. She founded the Feminist Alliance in 1914, becoming a leader both for her intellectual ideas and her fashion sense.

While Rodman and her followers’ preferred an austere dress of gray or brown tunics, embroidery and prints became common adornments, sparking a rise in batik printing and interest in European craft arts. As this bohemian fashion gained popularity, embroidered smocks and Russian blouses took hold as the dominant style of Greenwich Village.

In “Dress and Culture in Greenwich Village,” Deborah Saville asserts that “the smock was the dress item most associated with [the neighborhood]. A protest garment, the comfortable, inexpensive smock signified ideological arguments surrounding sexuality and capitalist-oriented social norms, particularly for radical women in the first part of the 1910s.” 

Dress was seen as a way to express progressive and feminist ideals. Saville discusses how these fashions were not just fleeting trends but spread to mainstream culture. The loose-fitting tunics of the 1910s would later evolve into the short-skirted flapper dresses of the 1920s, which held similar feminist-tinged meaning.