Ruth Finley interview, 2015 June 11, 2015 June 11 and August 6

Ruth Finley was born January 14, 1920, in Massachusetts to a Russian immigrant father and New York born mother. She attended Simmons College in Boston and received a Bachelor's of Science in Journalism and Nutrition. During her college education, she interned as a food journalist at the New York Herald Tribune and for Eleanor Lambert's Red Cross Fashion Show in Press Week. Two years after graduating, in 1941, she and a friend founded the Fashion Calendar. From the 1940s to the present, she played many roles in the New York fashion industry, including director of New York Fashion Council, member of Roundtable of Fashion Executives, and board member for philanthropic organizations, including City Meals on Wheels. Finley passed away in 2018.

Phyllis Dillon is an Independent Scholar and Consulting Museum Curator. She has worked for over 35 years in the fields of costume and textile studies, and in museums as a textile conservator, curator and arts administrator. She was a textile conservator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Textile Conservation Workshop. In the 1980s-90s she was a grants officer at the New York State Council on the Arts in the Museum Program. In that position she oversaw the distribution of millions of dollars to Museum’s statewide.



For the last 20 years she has concentrated her research on the history of the Jewish role in the American garment industry and the history of ready-made clothing. She was Main Researcher and Associate Curator of the National Endowment for the Humanities funded exhibit: “A Perfect Fit: The Garment Industry and American Jewry 1860-1960 at Yeshiva University Museum in the Center for Jewish History in 2005 and co-authored the catalogue of the same name. She also had an article in a second book called A Perfect Fit published by Texas University Tech in 2012.



She was Associate Producer and Main Researcher on a documentary film called “Dressing America: Tales from the Garment Center (2014) in collaboration with Pacific Street Films . The film showed in international film festivals and was aired on PBS in 2014 and 2016.



Her latest publication is a chapter co-written with British business historian Andrew Godley about the history of the American garment industry in the book Chosen Capital: The Jewish Encounter with American Capitalism from Rutgers University Press (July 2012).



She holds a Certificate in Museum Studies and an M.A. in anthropology from New York University. She was awarded a Winston Churchill Traveling Fellowship to Great Britain in 1981 to study the differences between American and British Art Conservation Services and has lectured widely. Since 2016 she has researched and done selected oral history interviews of senior members of the Fashion Industry for the Fashion Institute of Technology.

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