Wayne Knit: the stocking Fort Wayne sold to America

1891 — 1960

A fashion good, marketed like one: What Wayne Knitting Mills made was not a commodity but a garment with a look — full-fashioned hosiery, knit on imported German machinery to the contours of the leg, at a moment when practically all hosiery worn in the United States was imported from Europe; the founder's biographer puts the imported share at ninety percent. Theodore F. Thieme, who had visited the hosiery city of Chemnitz in Saxony in 1890, built the firm's selling on that fact. The trademark he registered told the whole pitch in five words: WAYNE KNIT, "American Made for American Trade." Thieme's own account, quoted in Ross F. Lockridge's 1942 biography, records that leading dry-goods and department stores made exclusive Wayne Knit window displays under that slogan and the line "Manufactured in Fort Wayne, Indiana," and that he carried the line store to store on the strength of an exclusive agency in each city. The skepticism he had to beat was itself about fashion: buyers assumed goods of that finish must be imported, and told him so.

Thieme dated his own education in publicity to the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago; in his account he left it planning to put Wayne Knit hose in front of fair crowds, and the 1904 St. Louis exposition made the plan real. The brand architecture was a fashion house's, decades before the term was common in American ready-to-wear. The flagship line sold as Matchless hosiery. In 1901 the company issued its children's stocking under a new trademark, Pony Stockings, and, in the words of the 1905 county history, "by unique and well directed advertising made them so well known that today Wayne Knitting Mills are believed to have a larger output than any other hosiery factory in the United States, their product being sold in every state in the Union." The History Center's account of the firm credits it with producing the nation's first line of fashion hosiery and exhibiting it at the St. Louis exposition of 1904 — the year the mills' payroll stood at 883, a boom the biography ties directly to Thieme's exposition publicity. When the product changed, the brand carried it: the History Center's collection holds a Wayne Knitting Mills nylon stocking dated 1940, the first year of the nylon era, and a painted sales-display statue of 1932, marked "Wayne Knit Hosiery," that stood in stores as a three-dimensional advertisement. The firm's story as a business — the 1923 Munsingwear sale, the long decline as silk gave way to synthetics, the 1960 closing — is told in the Business section; the fashion record is that for roughly three generations, a woman buying a good stocking anywhere in America was likely buying Fort Wayne's taste, in Fort Wayne's box, under a Fort Wayne name.

Sources:

1. Immigrant Entrepreneurship (German Historical Institute), "Theodore Frederick Thieme" — the Chemnitz visit, the "American Made for American Trade" advertising strategy, and the brand's national success.
2. Ross F. Lockridge, Theodore F. Thieme: A Man and His Times (1942) — Thieme's own account of the trademark, the exclusive window displays, and the 883-employee payroll of 1904.
3. History of the Maumee River Basin (1905) — the Pony Stockings trademark of 1901 and the contemporary output claim.
4. The History Center, Fort Wayne — the "first line of fashion hosiery" and 1904 St. Louis exposition account; collection records for the 1932 Wayne Knit display statue and the 1940 nylon stocking.
5. Businesses — the firm's corporate record, cross-referenced and not retold here.