H.R. Mallinson & Co. - American Silk from a Marketing Magician
by
Madelyn Shaw
At Hiram Royal
Mallinson’s death in 1931, his obituary proclaimed him “The Silk King.” President and genius behind the success of
H.R. Mallinson & Co., his death, as the Great Depression tightened its grip
on the American economy, foreshadowed the end of the firm he had helped shape
even before its name became Mallinson’s own.
Mallinson was
not a weaver, or dyer, or printer. He
was not a designer or a craftsman, and he had never raised silkworms or
manufactured yarn. He was the
exceptionally ambitious son of mid 19th century immigrants from
Poland, who entered the silk trade as a salesman. In 1895, after a short apprenticeship with Pelgram & Meyer,
Mallinson joined a new firm, Newitter & Migel, as head of sales. A few
years later Migel bought out Newitter, and renamed the firm M.C. Migel &
Co. Migel and Mallinson nurtured the
company into position as a respected provider of high quality silk and silk
blend staple and novelty silks, both woven and printed, until in 1913 Mallinson
bought the firm. In 1915, he changed
the company name to his own. From then
until the Depression intervened, the company was enormously successful,
cleverly merchandising quality products to an elite clientele.
The silk
industry was a volatile one, dependent on tariff protection, a docile labor
force, foreign raw materials and the whims of fashion. How and why did H.R. Mallinson & Co.
reach the top of that industry? This
paper will examine the combination of merchandise and marketing that
contributed to Mallinson’s success.
Madelyn Shaw is
Associate Curator of Costume & Textiles at the Museum of Art, Rhode Island
School of Design. She came to RISD from The Textile Museum, in Washington DC,
where she had been Director of the Lloyd Cotsen Textile Documentation
Project. Prior to that she was
Assistant Curator of Textiles at The Museum at The Fashion Institute of
Technology, in New York. She writes and
lectures on American textiles and fashion, and has taught in the
Cooper-Hewitt/Parsons Masters Program in American Decorative Art at the
Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC.
Her current research interests--besides the American silk
industry—include China trade textiles in Rhode Island and the role of European
ÈmigrÈs textile designers in bringing modernism to New York in the 1910s