Empresses of Seventh Avenue: World War II, New York City, and the Birth of American Fashion

$20.00 at de Young Museum.

Today, American designers are some of the biggest names in fashion, yet before World War II, they almost always worked anonymously. The industry, then centered on Seventh Avenue in Manhattan, had always looked overseas for "inspiration"—a polite phrase for what was often blatant copying—because style, as all the world knew, came from Paris.But when the Nazis invaded France in 1940, the capital of fashion was cut off from the rest of the world. The story of the chaos and tragedy that followed has been told…