Three designers searched the Metropolitan Museum for new and artistic
ideas, and he induced his company to install a battery of four-color
presses in order that the designs might be given in all the beauty of
their original colors. For months designers and artists worked; he had
the designs passed upon by a board of judges composed of New York women
who knew good clothes, and then he began their publication.
The editor of The New York Times asked Bok to conduct for that newspaper
a prize contest for the best American-designed dresses and hats, and
edit a special supplement presenting them in full colors, the prizes to
be awarded by a jury of six of the leading New York women best versed in
matters of dress. Hundreds of designs were submitted, the best were
selected, and the supplement issued under the most successful auspices.
In his own magazine, Bok published pages of American-designed fashions:
their presence in the magazine was advertised far and wide; conventions
of dressmakers were called to consider the salability of
domestic-designed fashions; and a campaign with the slogan "American
Fashions for American Women" was soon in full swing.
But there it ended. The women looked the designs over with interest, as
they did all designs of new clothes, and paid no further attention to
them. The very fact that they were of American design prejudiced the
women against them. America never had designed good clothes, they
argued: she never would.
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