Gauntlets

Bonnie Cashin created award-winning clothing known for its casual comfort. As the daughter of a dressmaker, she was exposed to textiles and fashion nearly from birth and began designing professionally in 1925, at age 17. Prior to establishing her own company in 1951, she designed for Adler & Adler and Twentieth Century-Fox. Thereafter she worked with manufacturers such as Sills and Co. and Coach to offer fashion and accessories in every price bracket. She was adept at manipulating organic components into modern basics which could easily be mixed, matched and layered for the active woman. Her brightly colored leather trim, metallic toggle hardware and shaped knits are still a recognizable trademark of her work today. In 1962 the Brooklyn Museum, with her assistance and donations, staged, "Bonnie Cashin Presents Her Living Sketch Book," which was a retrospective of her work. Cashin's forethought to preserve her past while still designing is one which makes her work still accessible today.

Bonnie Cashin's desire to design all aspects of a woman's wardrobe is evident in the accessories she produced during her long career. One such accessory is gloves, which she teamed with Crescendoe to make throughout the 1970s. She artistically combined leathers, knits, faux fur and metallic hardware to fulfill women's seasonal needs. She was often fanciful, with ideas such as hearts on the palm, and always sensible, with warm lining in the winter, while still understanding the needs of providing options in every price range to accommodate her clientele. In 1985, Cashin donated some of her samples to the Brooklyn Museum alongside their sketches. Although the gloves are not in complete sets they truly show the design process she took from the sketch inception to the complete prototype.

This glove shows Cashin's characteristic gold turn-lock which she incorporated in many of her glove designs as well as her purse designs for Coach.