We're getting extra lovable this #FashionFriday with a 1965 flier from the the Lovable Company of Atlanta, Georgia.
The company, founded around 1926 (reported dates vary) as the Lovable Brassiere Company by Frank Garson (1885-1955). Garson, a Jewish immigrant from Poland, relocated with his Austrian wife Gussie from New York City to Atlanta in the 1910s, where Frank began working in the undergarment industry.
The company raised more than eyebrows in the later 1920s when it began manufacturing and marketing push-up and padded bras to the general public at an affordable price for every day wear. But its more notable contributions to the local community came in the 1930s, when the Garsons, whose social circle would later include Martin Luther King, Jr. and other notable members of the Black Freedom Movement, began to racially integrate their workforce on the factory floor and lunchrooms, despite the company's location in the Jim Crow South.
The company also paid well at the time, with average wages set to be higher than national averages. Over time, the Lovable Company grew to become the sixth-largest maker of corsets, slips, brassieres, pajamas, and other intimate apparel in the United States. The company closed, however, in 1998 after unilateral contract renegotiations with Wal-Mart, it's biggest customer, in 1995 left the company unable to continue operations.
This item is part of Hagley Library's collection of Joseph Bancroft and Sons Company photographs (Accession 1969.025). Joseph Bancroft, an Englishman trained in textile weaving in Lancashire, established his own cotton mill on the Brandywine near Wilmington, Delaware in 1831. The firm was incorporated as the Joseph Bancroft & Sons Company in 1889.
To view more material from this collection online now, click here to visit its page in our Digital Archive.