Ensemble

Versatility and resonance were built into 1950s clothes, which often repeated the material of a dress in the lining of its complementary coat. Fogarty had the military order in mind when she coordinated a tailored coat with a knit dress. While she more often created to high style and wrote a book entitled Wife Dressing in 1959, she nonetheless thought in terms of ingenious pragmatism. Belying the book's title, she wrote with some toughness: "If I had to boil down my thinking about clothes into one word, that word would be—DISCIPLINE—of the mind, the body, and the emotions. DISCIPLINE makes you the woman you are rather than a hodgepodge of everyone else's ideas chosen without consideration of your own coloring and proportions." This is a disciplined ensemble.