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From The New Yorker: At the Galleries, MAy 3, 2010
Closet Encounters
by Judith Thurman

The Depression and the Second World War politicized American fashion, which had never before had a serious left wing. Charles James, in the meantime, was proving that an American could produce ball gowns that rivalled those of the French in luxury and finesse. He was a consummate mandarin (his mother was a patrician from Chicago, his father a British officer), with an exclusive following—Babe Paley, Austine Hearst, Dominique de Menil, and Marietta Tree. But in the early sixties he outdid himself for a favorite client—a daughter of the people, as the French would say—who was better known without her clothes than for them: Gypsy Rose Lee.