In an Easter Dress, a Social Set Revealed

Guy Trebay
The New York Times
Sunday, March 18th, 2007
The Story
The Summary: A classic dress is a window to the working women of the past.

Who can say when the cherry dress came into being? People here can tell you only that it was always there. For 50 years the cherry dress has been the holiday uniform for the fine-featured towheads at places like the St. Louis Country Club or exclusive Midwestern summer resorts like Harbor Point or Charlevoix, Mich. For 50 years, the cherry dress has been a consistent best seller at the Woman’s Exchange of St. Louis, a modest nonprofit shop and institution itself about as old as electrification, having opened its doors in 1883.

Clothes have become a throw-away item, especially in the middle class. We wouldn't dream of spending $500 on a pair of shoes, but spend $20 on a pair that will go in the garbage at the end of the season. The clothes the middle class can afford aren't made as well as they once were, and their prices reflect this. (I recently bought a slough of $2 shirts and $3 skirts at Rue 21, stating that even if they don't last, or I wear them once, I only spend $2) This dress looks back on a time when you bought an item, wore it until you couldn't anymore, and then passed it along to the next person.

What is it about the cherry dress, one may ask? What was it about any of the simple preppy staples that turned into classics, things like penny loafers or blue blazers or button-down shirts?

They functioned so well that people forgot to change them. They were so stylistically generic that, for a very long while, they escaped the tentacles of fashion. They were so reassuringly dowdy that they became background, no small point in a world where people still think that it is one who wears clothes and not the other way around. And they were durable.

“There’s a timeless quality to them, and they’re dresses that you hold on to,” Carrie Polk, one of four sisters with deep family roots in this river city, said of cherry dresses. “Three generations in our family have worn them. They’re like clothes from before the disposable-clothes era, with hems the size of Texas. You didn’t just spill chocolate on one and pitch it. You got it cleaned and ironed, and if you grew, you brought down the hem.”

...that place itself is a historical rarity, perhaps the largest among the remaining outposts of a once-thriving national network of nonprofit “exchanges” for women’s work.

Of scores that existed at the height of the movement, there are now about 20 left, including outposts in Memphis, St. Augustine, Fla., and Brooklyn. The women’s exchanges, voluntary social service agencies, originated in 19th-century Philadelphia as places for genteel ladies fallen on hard times to discreetly earn a living without leaving home.

Imagine the time when it was scandelous for a woman to work outside the home, at least women of a certain stature. Even the richest women these days have some sort of income, even if it is "just for fun." The idea of the Women's Exchange is interesting. It was a job, an consignment shop that you brought your homemade goods to to sell. The idea of it is almost shocking in our foreign-made $2 shirt world.

Even as the populations of consigners shifted from genteel ladies down on their luck to new immigrants trying to find a toehold, the women’s exchange in St. Louis stayed afloat, in the way that successful retailers do, by understanding its market. The city has an unusually robust country club scene and its members patronize the gift shop and tearoom as avidly as their mothers and grandmothers did.

The few exchanges that have stayed afloat do so by family tradition. The story of the woman who sews the cherry dress is somewhat inspirational.

It's nice to see old traditions going strong. There is so much that has died in the wake of large chains and franchises. Unique-ness in region and industry is becoming a thing of the past. I can get the same hamburger anywhere in the world thanks to McDonalds, and the same shirt thanks to Walmart. When I go to a new place, I want to expeirience the local flavor, but there's less and less of that. I can go to Applebee's in Bemidji, why would I want to go to one in Chicago or New York? St. Louis has it's Cherry Dress, I hope it holds on to it.