The Romney Dress Company
This interesting little collection of pages appears to be a group of internal documents for a January promotion of the company's dress line.
Included are some typewritten pages that are clearly company memos, (I'd love to know who RVS:MT is at the bottom of the text!) along with printed sketches and descriptions of the garments.
Internet sleuthing turned up nothing under the name Romney Dress for the 1930 - 1939 period. I suspect that they might have been a wholesale company that sold through department stores - rather than a direct to the customer supplier.
A group of clothing manufacturers is given in the Resource List section of the documents, with each style number assigned to a company. While no city is given, the addresses provide a bit of a clue. During the 1930's the garment district in New York was centered around Seventh Avenue, where the majority of the companies on the list were located.
Again, internet searching did not turn up anything about the individual companies, so their details are lost to history.
Among the designs are two noted as "adapted from Vionnet", one ascribed to "Goupy" and one ascribed to "Germaine Lecomte". It's impossible to know if these were licensed from the designers, or if they were knock-offs, as both were common during the 1930's.
Information on Vionnet is easy to find, so I won't rehash the history of the designer here.
Germain Lecomte started her fashion house in 1920, and continued producing garments through the 1950's. She designed costumes for several movies, and exhibited garments at the 1939 Worlds Fair. A collection of fashion sketches and photographs of her work can be found here.
Information on Goupy - was much harder to find. There are a few extant examples of the designer's garments, one of which is here.
An excerpt from the 1932 Home Journal mentions Goupy as follows
"If you are just a tourist in Paris, you pause on the Rue de Castiglione, at the house of Goupy, to look into the windows at the smart hats and the pretty lingerie. Perhaps you only enter the front salon to inquire the price of a nightie. But if you are native, you go into the back of the shop, sit on one of the comfortable chairs with ashtray neatly attached, and you will see some of the prettiest mannequins in Paris showing some of the best clothes. Goupy is particularly happy in sports dresses, which Monsieur Goupy designs. Madame Goupy makes the hats, which are quite plastered down on one side, very up-tilted on the other, and inclined to reveal a couple inches above the nape of the neck. One of the best lace dresses of the season is shown here - a very simple white one, with tiny black puff sleeves and a black belt. Goupy is undoubtedly one of the most popular houses for the visiting American, who is first attracted by its location, and second by the exquisite taste of the hats and dresses shown at the sanctum in the rear."
I'd love to hear from anyone who finds information on Romney Dresses, the companies on the Resource List, or more on the life of designer Groupy!
Download links to the documents are below. I broke them into two files so as not to compromise the quality of the images too much. I've edited and cleaned up the images as well as possible. The original printing was not high quality, and the paper of newsprint quality and very yellowed.
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