Fashion

The Abe Grubère collection documents the work of Abe Grubère (also known as Abraham Gruber), a New York City fashion designer, active in the field of fashion from the 1920s to the 1960s. The papers reflect the work of Grubère as a designer and also document his involvement with the Central High School for Needle Trades, where he helped to organize a class that was held at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in the summer of 1942. Although the bulk of the documents found in the collection consists of sketches, the collection also includes clippings, booklets, correspondence, financial documentation, and materials pertaining to Grubère's teaching activities.

These are letters, written between October 1952 and January 1959 by Kurt Levin in New York City to his former client, Princess Luise von Preussen, first in Schloss Nordkirchen in North Rhine Westphalia until December of 1956 and then in Bückeburg in Lower Saxony, Germany. Most letters are typed, unless indicated otherwise. Attached are mostly undated clippings from the American press. – Also included are a detailed, English language synopsis of all letters by Sylvia Irwin, as is a "history of the Dannenbaum family" with the genealogy of Kurt Levin's ancestry.

The collection represents Uwe Westphal’s research material for his book about the heydays and ultimate destruction of Berlin’s clothing and fashion industry, 1836-1939: ‘Berliner Konfektion und Mode : die Zerstoerung einer Tradition’.