Bonnie Cashin Finding Aid

I chose to explore the finding aid concerning Bonnie Cashin and her collection of fashion, theater, and film costume design during the time period of 1913-2000. The collection is held at the UCLA Library Special Collections and consists of over 400 articles. The compilation consists of Cashin’s fashion illustrations, press materials, paperwork and photographs of her successful design career. Personal items of Cashin are also included such as letters and photographs.

Right off the bat, we are able to learn about the historical biography of Ms. Cashin due to the arrangement of the finding aid. The biography includes an extensive list of the different productions and designers that she worked for. Furthermore, it also includes the series of awards and achievements she received up until her death in 2000.

When looking at the collection at a broad view, we can simply see the arise of Cashin’s career over the years. The container first involves contents of the designers high school illustrations which shows that she has always had an early interest in fashion. Later we see there is an arise in the amount of content during the years after 1943, so one could hypothesize that this was the around the time when Cashin’s career flourished. We are also able to see the transition of her type of media through this archive. It seems that she worked on more films and costume wear during the 40s due to the more theatrical components in the collection. While during the 1950s and forward we see the content more situated amongst ready to wear and evening collections.

An interesting component of this collection is that it highlights the work that Cashin put in to her designs. One can see the hundreds of illustrations that were thought of before putting the clothing into production. We are also able to see the basis of her art by comparing the illustration to the actual clothing as many of them are photographed in editorials or advertisements. This finding aid links to

By looking at the essay component of the archive, we also see the heavy influence of Ms. Cashin on the American woman as she has written numerous articles on her opinions on how to dress. There is a separate section for Ms. Cashins fur designs which suggests that her customer is of a certain class.

It is notable to see that Cashin recorded a trip to India where she researched different textile and manufacturing industries. This is important as it shows the amount of detail and experience the designer thought about when making her work.

Missing from this narrative is specific details about the sales of her clothing. We can see that she is successful due to the amount of work she reached over her career but we do not know who is her customer. We could contact the Bonne Cashin estate and ask for documents regarding sales and customer identifications. By receiving this information, we could look at the trends in sales in order to further support the hypothesis of when her career arose as well as seeing the class and income of her customers.