Fashion Academy; with: “A Visit to Fashion Academy” (promotional brochure)

New York: Thomsen-Ellis Company, 1938. Wonderfully illustrated 1938 course guide for the Fashion Academy at Rockefeller Center, with an original promotional brochure, aimed at the young woman who “knows there is no room for the dilettante” in modern fashion design. Known for his annual best-dressed lists and design awards, founder Emil Alvin Hartman ran the Fashion Academy, then the city’s only specialized fashion design school, from 1920 to 1950. Located in the tower of the newly built R.C.A. skyscraper, “in the heart of the ultra modern fashion center of New York,” the Academy offered students a broad curriculum encompassing fashion design, styling, merchandising, illustration, theatrical costume design, and fashion writing. Special offerings included field trips, extension courses for the trade, and the opportunity to study in Paris; this 1938 course guide, published the year before France entered World War II, contains a post-publication stamp: “Paris study trips temporarily suspended due to present unsettled conditions abroad.” A very good example of a fragile and elegant production, with accompanying brochure. Single volume, measuring 7.5 x 5 inches: [4], 5-47, [1]. Original wood-grain patterned paper boards, pictorial copper foil label to upper board, title blindstamped to spine, publisher’s logo blindstamped to lower board, color pictorial endpapers. Tipped-in color frontispiece and eighteen color costume plates (one double-page) in text, pictorial colophon. Contemporary bookplate to front free endpaper. Extremities lightly rubbed, frontispiece adhesive visible on verso. With: original illustrated promotional brochure, measuring 7 x 4.25 inches, unfolding to 17 inches, printed in black and silver. (Inventory #: 1003983)