Demorest, Ellen Louise Curtis

Demorest, Ellen Louise Curtis

(1824–98) fashion arbiter; born in Schuylerville, N.Y. A successful milliner, she invented mass-produced tissue-paper dressmaking patterns and with her husband, publisher and reformer William Jennings Demorest, established a company to sell and a magazine to promote them (1860). The Demorests adapted the latest French fashions for ordinary women, greatly influencing American fashion.