New York was the primary American center for dissemination of fashion and style information through the publication of the bigger magazines. Most cities, however, had department stores with custom departments catering to a wealthy clientele and sections called "Budget," "Moderate," or "Better" dresses to accommodate less well-off working-and middle-class customers. Many of these stores produced mail-order catalogues of their merchandise or small in-house style magazines to distribute to customers. Chicago's Marshall Field & Company published Fashions of the Hour "periodically," while William Filene"s & Sons Company in Boston published Clothes on a quarterly schedule. Store catalogues are often particularly interesting for the many different names and price levels of departments within the store. Among the Filene's departments were the French Shop (few-of-a-kind dresses), Misses' Gown Shop, Women's Inexpensive Dress Shop, Misses' Sport Shop, and the House Frocks Shop.(17) Department stores without the means to publish their own magazine could distribute a bi-monthly publication called Modes & Manners, which was produced with the store's name and city on the cover, but contained generic fashion and home-decorating information, including coverage of the Paris trends, and national ads [fig. 80]. Two copies exist in the RISD files, one (complete) from P. A. Bergner and Co. in Peoria, Illinois (April -May 1929) and the other (cover only) from the Jordan Marsh Company in Boston (April -May 1926).(18) Of course, mail-order catalogues from firms that had no retail outlets, such as the National Cloak and Suit Company, were also in circulation.

Many manufacturers of apparel, fabrics, and accessories also published style sheets or books for the trade, which illustrated how their products should be used or worn. Maurice Rentner put out "his own little fashion magazine" called Quality Street, for which he claimed to write most of the copy himself.(19) H. R. Mallinson & Company put out its Blue Book of Silks regularly. A 1921 booklet illustrated fabrics, clothing, and accessories through black-and-white photographs. The 1926 booklet that accompanied their "American National Parks" silk series included photographs of the parks, the textile designs derived from the photographs, and drawings of dress patterns from several companies to show how the fabrics might be best used.(20) According to Mallinson ads in Harper's Bazar in the 1920s, the booklets were available to readers by mail at a cost of ten cents. Several Haas Brothers sample books, containing fabric samples and illustrations of garments, exist in the Tirocchi Archive. The Textile Department of The Museum at The Fashion Institute of Technology possesses several books from No-Mend Hosiery Company of the 1930s and 40s, which contain actual samples of hosiery with drawings of the season's new styles and swatches of appropriate fabrics and leathers from the textile and leather manufacturers themselves [fig. 81]. Another firm advertised that its "Holeproof Color Ensemble Book," found in hosiery departments, was an important guide for fashion-conscious consumers. E.M.A. Steinmetz illustrated the book shown in the May 1932 Harper's Bazaar ad. These books may also have functioned as salesmen's sample books.

Readers also saw illustrations for the new fashions in advertisements from shops and stores in the local papers and for large manufacturers, regional department stores, and bigger specialty shops in the magazines. Even general interest and business magazines such as Fortune, Life, and Collier's presented features on fashion designers or manufacturers, particularly in the 1930s, as interest in American designers grew and as American industries -including the fashion industries -began to prepare for the coming war in Europe.