Helene Gowns Illustrations & Sign, ca. 1925
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GUEST:
My Great-Aunt Helen was a dress designer in Chicago. She designed dresses as long as I knew her, and this is part of her collection of dresses that she made over time for people. She owned a shop called Helene Gowns. Her name was Helen, and she changed her name to Helene because her last name was Klinge, and little kids used to tease her and say, "Go to hell and cling." So she changed her name to Helene. These are some of the designs that, that she made, although...
APPRAISER:
Did your aunt tell you the process that she went through designing?
GUEST:
I knew she was very good at making things and designing things. She had a great eye. She could hold fabric up and cut it to the shape of a person without putting it on their body, which was pretty amazing. I've seen her work, and it's absolutely immaculate. And it was all done on a Singer treadle machine. She never used an electrified machine.
APPRAISER:
That's amazing. One of the cool things about your aunt is, she's a very well-known dressmaker from Chicago. And she was a specialist in creating beautiful garments at a reasonable price. And she did really beautiful work. It's very rare to find some of her original illustrations. First off, you see a number on each one. This actually is the number of the design that she created.
GUEST:
Okay.
APPRAISER:
And she did custom work for people. She was an artist in her own way, and she had a great personality. She did these amazing different designs. And in the center, we have a card that tells about what she could do to create. And at the very top, we actually have the sign from her store.
GUEST:
The sign they dug out of the chicken coop where they stored a lot of stuff, so, yeah, it survived.
APPRAISER:
We actually can tell that most of these are, like, 1922 to about 1926. Right in that time period. I love the detail work on each of them, they have descriptions of the gown on them. They have the signature not only of her shop, but the lady that hand-watercolored the illustrations.
GUEST:
Yes.
APPRAISER:
As you can see, the signature is Ethel Rabin, so...
GUEST:
She was quite adamant about, when she showed them to me originally, about, "Her name's on there, but those are mine."
APPRAISER:
(laughing) One of the fun things about '20s sketches is, they say that if these women were real women, they would be over nine feet tall and a size zero, because the '20s gowns were not as slenderizing as these gowns in the illustrations make you look. They actually were a little on the frumpy side for most people, unless you had a real slender figure. Helene was a master at putting beautiful fabrics and beautiful designs together. In today's market, her illustrations sell in the neighborhood of $150 apiece.
GUEST:
Wonderful.
APPRAISER:
But her sign is valuable as a piece of fashion history. And so the sign itself would sell in the $250 to $300 range.
GUEST:
Wonderful-- I'm glad they dug that out of the chicken coop, that's good.
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