At the 1918 annual conference of the American Federation of Art, Richard Bach, curator of industrial art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, said, "It will be an evil day for manufacturers and dealers after the war if American taste must again go to Europe for industrial art products."

In 1912 Leon Leonwood Bean founded L. L. Bean, Inc., of Freeport, Maine, a mail-order sporting-goods empire worth $3.5 million by the time of his death in 1967. The casual, sporting clothes sold in his catalogues were a major component of the "preppy" look that became popular during the second half of the twentieth century.

In 1917 Henri Bendel, an importer and designer, was one of several influential members of the New York fashion world to write about American and French fashion in Harper's Bazar.

On 23 February 1913 Irma Campbell, an in-house designer for Lord...