David Wolfe interview, 2018 February 21, 2018 February 21

David Wolfe has worked in fashion industry for over 50 years, and is one of the industry’s most influential trend forecasters. Born in 1941 in Ohio, he took a strong interest in fashion illustration as a young boy. In his first job at Carlisle’s Department Stores, a small family-owned chain in Ohio, Wolfe was given free reign to take on multiple roles, including visual merchandise director, and teen fashion coordinator. He also wrote advertising copy and created fashion illustrations for the advertising department, and worked on their bridle fashion shows. Wolfe there met and married his wife Sheila, who helped foster his career as a fashion illustrator. During a visit to London in the late 1960s, Wolfe landed an illustration job at the prestigious fashion store, Fortnum & Mason. He then worked steadily as a freelance fashion illustrator for the next 20 years, for publications including the London Sunday Times, Womenswear Daily, and Galeries Lafayette. He also began working with Lee Rudd's I.M. International fashion forecasting business, which provided reports for department stores, textile companies, color companies, and designers. After a couple of years working with the forecasting company, IM International, in 1981, Wolfe started his own company, The Fashion Service, which created and sold trend information to designers, and advised merchandisers on what they should buy. In 1990, he joined the New York-based Doneger Group, from which he retired from his position as Creative Director 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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