Milwaukee Journal’s Aileen Ryan
This afternoon I am working on revisions for the article I am working on the women’s section of the Milwaukee Journal. I am focusing on the work of fashion editor Aileen Ryan – a three-time Penney-Missouri Award winner.
During her first summer of work in 1921, Ryan attended a meeting to hear Milwaukee Journal Editor Marvin Creager say he was happy to have females on the staff because “women have cleaned up newspaper offices.” Ryan later recalled the statement made her feel as though she had been hired to use a mop.
Ryan started under the editorship of women’s page journalist Elizabeth B. Moffet. Moffett had been recruited from the Kansas City Star, where she had pioneered a new method of covering fashion that went beyond simply promoting the clothing of the advertisers. Moffet was hired because the Milwaukee Journal publisher wanted to “handle fashion news with more objectivity.” Moffett would visit the local fashion houses and bring along an artist to sketch the clothing. She would then give a critical analysis of the styles.
During her first trip to New York, the fashion capital of the country, she made fashion journalism history. It was 1931 and at that point, only magazine reporters and buyers were allowed into the fashion shows. Ryan would not accept that policy. She knocked on as many as 12 showroom doors a day and got access to about a third of them. She recounts that no one had heard of the Milwaukee newspaper, but she eventually prevailed and sent clips of her stories to those New York designers. Ryan said that eventually “the New Yorkers began to understand the value of what I was doing.”
Ryan continued to fight for more access each year, and she slowly was able to get access for her photographer, too. This meant other newspapers had to buy their fashion photographs from the Milwaukee Journal. In 1937, images from Ryan’s trips to the fashion shows in Europe became the first color photos in the Journal.
During Ryan’s reign, Wisconsin played an important role in the fashion world: Milwaukee was a major textile-manufacturing center in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1963, Ryan convinced the Milwaukee-area apparel and textile makers to unveil their products in Milwaukee before the New York shows. As part of that drive, she helped to establish the Heritage Milwaukee event to promote local companies such as the Junior House (now J.H. Collectibles) and the Great Lakes Mink Association. The showings at the event attracted newspapers from across the country, including the International Herald Tribune and the New York Times. As many of two dozen fashion editors would make the trip to Milwaukee for the event – putting the city on the fashion map.
According to the late Milwaukee public relations executive Lyn Skeen, Milwaukee’s fashion industry was larger than its brewing industry at the time: “Fashion was big business in our state.” And a 1969 article in the New York Times, noted that Wisconsin ranked fourth nationally as a producer of women’s fashion apparel, behind California, New York and Texas.
