The designs were found in a Milwaukee basement in 1997.
Keira Hockers knew little about the Holocaust when a professor introduced in class fashion sketches by Hedvika “Hedy” Strnad, a Bohemian Jewish “lady tailor” who owned a dress shop in Prague before the Nazi Occupation. But Hockers, a junior studying textile and fashion design at the UW-Madison’s School of Human Ecology, has spent the past year creating a modern spin on Hedy’s 1939 designs.
Hockers is one of 16 textile and design students who contributed to “Inspired by Hedy,” a fashion design slideshow displayed in conjunction with the traveling exhibit “Stitching History From the Holocaust,”a period collection based on Strnad’s sketches. Both shows are on display in the Ruth Davis Design Gallery on the UW-Madison campus until Nov. 13.
“Stitching History From the Holocaust” was created by Jewish Museum Milwaukee in 2014. The Milwaukee Repertory Theater’s costume department created clothing using the sketches Hedy’s husband Paul sent in 1939 to his Milwaukee cousin, Alvin Strnad. The drawings came with a letter containing a covert plea to help find employment for his wife (who he didn’t name to protect her) in the United States. Hedy and Paul never made it out; they were killed after spending time in the Theresienstadt concentration camp and being forcibly relocated to the Warsaw ghetto. But Hedy’s creative vision lives on.
The collection features eight outfits displaying classic mid-20th-century styles — padded shoulders, cinched and belted waists, handsomely tailored jacket-and-skirt sets, and perfectly paired accessories. Twelve costume-makers spent 3,000 hours of work and research, assembling each piece in period fabric, such as rayon and boucle. Floral prints were hand-stenciled, painted and silkscreened. Mannequins with stylized paper wigs were carefully chosen. And to fully honor the woman whose tragic story inspired a new generation of dressmakers, a label, using Hedy’s signature, was hand-sewn into each piece: “Hedy Original.”
Strnad drew these silhouettes as casual outfits for an active, carefree lifestyle — in stark contrast to her own haunting story as one of millions killed by Nazis in Europe between 1933 and 1945.
The story of how the designs were brought to life decades after Strnad died in the Warsaw ghetto began in 1997, when Alvin’s son Burton discovered the letter and sketches from Prague — complete with a Nazi censor’s swastika stamp — in his mother’s Milwaukee basement. He took them to Kathie Bernstein, then the director of the Jewish Historical Society, who was stockpiling artifacts that would later become Jewish Museum Milwaukee. “I assured him these would be used someday,” says Bernstein.
Eleven years later, the museum opened, and the letter and sketches were displayed as part of the museum’s permanent collection. Soon after, the museum’s education director, Ellie Gettinger, brought her mother to the show. She said, “Do more with those; make them into dresses.”
“My initial feeling was, we just opened a museum, what more could we possibly do?” says Gettinger. “But we never thought of that.” There were also unanswered questions. In the letter, Hedy’s husband never used his wife’s name. Who was she? A breakthrough came when a museum intern traveling in Germany located Hedy’s niece in Nuremberg using information from Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center. With more of the artist’s story in place, the museum partnered with the Milwaukee Repertory Theater, which began the painstaking process of turning Hedy’s sketches into clothing.
“We wouldn’t have gone on this chase if we weren’t taking these two-dimensional images and fleshing them out,” says Gettinger. “We needed to flesh out the story as well.”
