Jessie Franklin Turner

Franklin Turner stated that she was born in St. Louis in Missouri, to Richard Major Turner of Wheeling, West Virginia, and Louise Pullen Franklin of Plymouth, Massachusetts on 10 December 1881, although Morris de Camp Crawford presented her as being a Virginian native from the state's tidewater region when promoting her alongside other American textile and fashion designers in his 1916-1922 "Made in America" campaign. After Turner's birth, their parents moved to Peoria, Illinois. She was trained in singing, painting, and sculpture when she was a child. She attended sculpting classes at the Paris studio of sculptor Antoine Bourdelle. Turner studied high school education at Berkeley School in Peoria. In chapter 3 of the 1955 Patrick Dennis novel, Auntie Mame: An Irreverent Escapade, it is winter 1931 and Jessie Franklin Turner is a character that hires the fictitious Auntie Mame as a saleswoman to work in her shop. She married Charles Hiram Ferguson, but retained her maiden name professionally. She died in 1956. ==Career==

) When Turner was a teenager, she was employed in a local lingerie store called Fischer Brothers, where she suggested to the owner that she could improve the quality and range of their merchandise. Following this, she became a buyer for the lingerie department at the St. Louis department store Scruggs, Vandervoort and Barney. Between 1913 and 1915 Bonwit deployed Turner to the Philippines to supervise a handmade lingerie factory there. In 1919 the American Museum of Natural History featured a selection of 'Winifred Warren' teagowns and lingerie for Bonwit Teller in their Exhibition of Industrial Art in Textiles and Costumes. Developing her work by directly draping on a model, Franklin Turner was known particularly for flowing tea gowns and exotic evening dresses, often made in fabrics of her own design. In 1923 she acknowledged the influence of historical and ethnographic textiles in the Brooklyn Museum's collections on many of her most successful designs. These influences continued throughout her career. In 1938, a day dress based on an Ainu coat was exhibited alongside the original coat in the second annual exhibition of New York's Museum of Costume Art. Franklin Turner was one of the directors of this museum, which was located in the Rockefeller Center on the fourth floor. In 1923 Paul Poiret was quoted as having declared Franklin Turner "the only designer of genius in the United States." Although Franklin Turner reportedly never met any of her clients, She retired in 1943. ==Exhibitions==

• 1919: Exhibition of Industrial Art in Textiles and Costumes, American Museum of Natural History. Selection of 'Winifred Warren' teagowns and lingerie designed for Bonwit Teller. • 2013-14 An American Style, Bard Graduate Center. The 1919 AMNH exhibition revisited. Garments by Jessie Franklin Turner are in the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute, and the Rhode Island School of Design Museum. ==References==