Josefa Nielson Osborn was a Gilded Age socialite and one of the most fashionable women in Manhattan society of the 1880s and 90s. The financial panic that began in 1893 financially ruined her husband, prompting her to make her own income. She became a fashion columnist and regularly wrote for The Delineator magazine. Within a year, she was designing theatrical costumes. She told a reporter, “Clothes were always my passion. I do not mean clothes merely as clothes, but artistic clothes made to suit the individual wearer. I used to advise my friends about their gowns. When the time came…when I found myself obliged to earn money, I began to advise professionally. I designed the gowns worn by Miss Julie Opp in ‘The Tree of Knowledge (1897).’ That achievement was my start.”
“She intends to take commissions to design all the costumes for the productions of modern plays, believing that she will be able to effect artistic and ‘swell’ results in studying individual and ensemble requirements,” said The New York Dramatic Mirror. “If Mrs. Osborn succeeds in supplanting the crude, inharmonious, and flashy costumes now common on the stage of certain theatres whose managers show their blissful ignorance of good form, she will be doing good missionary work.” She was soon designing for her friends too and opened her dressmaking company—the Mrs. Osborn Company.
As Fifth Avenue millionaires were moving northwards, she remodeled a vacant mansion directly across from the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel into her office. The business was an instant success, and she dressed the foremost actresses of the day, including Ethel Barrymore and top socialites like Caroline Astor and Alva Belmont. Her gowns were regarded as the most beautiful made by any American designer. The success of the business is reflected in its employee salaries. A fitter named Mr. John E. Sullivan was making over $1,000 a week in today’s dollars. She had decided by 1904 that she no longer needed a husband and divorced Robert Osborn. The building she occupied was razed to make way for the B. Altman department store, and she was forced to relocate. Josefa herself didn’t go out much anymore and preferred to make money instead. On March 31, 1908, The Evening World published a list of the gowns and accessories Mrs. Howard Gould purchased from the shop in a period of nine months. Her husband was annoyed at the bill, totaling $20,750. She passed away from appendicitis later that year.
Written by Sine McEllin of Ian Drummond Vintage