Elizabeth Hawes - Education

Education

Like her mother and elder sister Charlotte, she attended Vassar. She was very intelligent and a good student, passing her comprehensives without difficulty. During her freshman year she assisted the costume designer for the annual outdoor play. She found she was good at the compulsory courses, such as mathematics and chemistry, getting A grades, but was bored by the literature and art courses she chose to take, only earning B's. She chose to focus on economics, eventually working up to advanced Economic Theory. Her thesis, based upon the words of Ramsay MacDonald, gained her an A.

In her free time, Hawes focused on clothing. In 1923, at the end of her sophomore year, she went on a six-week course at Parson's School of Fine and Applied Arts, where she decided no art school could teach her how to design clothes. While the students did life drawing, Hawes was exasperated that nobody mentioned anatomy to her, which she felt was necessary if she wanted to dress "living human beings who had bones and muscles". She decided she needed more useful experience, so during the 1924 summer break she secured an unpaid apprenticeship in the Bergdorf Goodman workrooms, to learn how expensive clothes were made to order. Before she left to return to college, the French imports came into the store, and she decided she wanted to travel to France to find out what fashion was all about.

Hawes only had $25 a month for all her expenses, including clothing, so raising the funds for her proposed trip posed a problem. First, she tried to graduate six months early in the year of 1924–25 as she had enough credits. However, as the Dean of the college had decided that no diplomas could be given out before the end of four full years, Hawes was unable to leave early. Eventually, she resumed dressmaking, designing clothes for her classmates, and selling her designs through a dress shop on the edge of the campus. She earned a few hundred dollars through commissions from the shop. She also advertised her services in the Vassar paper.

Despite a brief crisis where Hawes wondered if she should be devoting her life to humanitarian work, she was advised by her economics teacher to take advantage of her clothing-focused gifts and desires. She graduated in the spring of 1925, and prepared to set sail for Paris that July. As her mother was a prominent local citizen, the Newark News decided to interview Elizabeth before she left. This interview, when published, led to a woman from the advertising department for a department store in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, offering Hawes $15 a month to report back fashion news from Paris for their advertising copy. Inspired by this, Hawes asked her local newspaper if they wanted a regular report from Paris. They accepted this offer, and offered her $10 a month to do so.

She graduated from Vassar in 1925.

On July 8, 1925, Elizabeth Hawes and a friend, Evelyn Johnson (whose mother had married a French perfume importer), sailed for France on the RMS Berengaria, student third-class.