Kept in the cases: the fashion record in Fort Wayne's collections

1932 — present

What the city kept of its own style: Fort Wayne's fashion survives in its institutions' cases (the museums themselves are the Museums section's). The History Center holds the trade's advertising made solid: a painted Wayne Knit display statue of 1932, made to stand in stores and sell stockings, and a Wayne Knitting Mills nylon stocking of 1940, the new fiber in its first year. The Allen County Public Library's collections hold the paper record — the Wayne Knitting Mills company's own publications, the Wayne Knit Rav-Lings of 1913 and the company News Letter of 1952–54, and the Bill Blass Archive at the Genealogy Center. The Fort Wayne Museum of Art holds the hometown designer's beginnings — the ink evening-gown sketches Bill Blass drew at South Side in 1935 — and in 2022 hung his mature work in the city for the first time. Between the statue, the stocking, the sketches, and the company newsletters, the materials of this whole section sit within a few blocks of the stores and mills that produced them.

Sources:

1. The History Center, collection records — the 1932 Wayne Knitting Mills display statue (accession 95.35.1) and the 1940 nylon stocking.
2. Allen County Public Library digital collections — the Wayne Knitting Mills collection (Wayne Knit Rav-Lings, 1913; News Letter, 1952–54) and the Bill Blass Archive, Genealogy Center.
3. Fort Wayne Museum of Art — the 1935 Blass sketches (gift of the Blanche Hutto Estate) and the 2022 exhibition record.
4. Museums — the institutions' own histories, cross-referenced and not retold here.