Picture a Venn diagram. One circle relates to the heyday of fashion illustration. Another represents a particular era of Kent, Connecticut history, and the third marks the current exhibition at the Kent Art Association. At the center of it all would be Jeanne McRoberts. She is the connection with renowned Lord & Taylor creative director Kermit Adler (1927-2008), whom she commissioned to illustrate the ads for her Kent clothing store, the Barn Shop, toward the end of the last century. It was a particular time in Kent's development. And it is McRoberts who has gathered up those iconic illustrations and ads for the Kent Art Association’s Retrospective Invitational Show. McRoberts’s portion of the show is titled the same as her new book, The Art of Fashion — 1990s Illustrations by Kermit Adler. The exhibit runs through November 30.

Photo credit: Linda Hubbard

Let’s start with McRoberts’s involvement with the Barn Shop, which locals will probably remember and the rest of us can relate to as every town’s high-end “dress shop” (with men’s clothing as well) of earlier decades, before online shopping stole their viability. McRoberts grew up in Greenwich Village but moved to the Litchfield Hills in the ’50s. She began to work for the Barn Shop in 1967 after he two sons started school. She describes what working there was like, at first.

“The Barn Shop was an interesting little boutique started by a couple from New York who left the city in 1946,” she begins. “They opened it in a barn on their property under the Cornwall Bridge. They were there for ten years. Then another couple, who were summer weekenders in Kent, took over. It sounds like the beginning of a joke: A woman goes to buy her husband a shirt and ends up buying a business.”

That couple, the Gladdens, built a barn for the shop two miles outside of Kent, although they neglected to install indoor plumbing. McRoberts was working part-time, but when the Gladdens decided to retire, she bought the business and the property from them in 1976. She also added a well and septic system to install an indoor bathroom.

“I’d had all the fun I could stand with the outhouse,” she says, tongue firmly in cheek. “But I kept the outhouse there as a reminder of how much fun it was in the winter.” In 1988, recognizing that the town of Kent was “morphing” into one with an emerging local art scene and burgeoning tourism, she sold that property and moved the shop to downtown Kent. Her merchandise — high-end, ready-to-wear collections from lines including Castleberry, Bleyle, Geiger, Anne Crimmins, Leon Levin and Ciao — fit right in with the village’s influx of city folks visiting or moving to Northwest Connecticut.

Photo credit: Linda Hubbard

Elegance in advertising

In the late 80s, some retailers were still using illustrations in their ads.

“The Litchfield County Times was a good newspaper, and I wanted to be able to run my ads in there,” McRoberts says. A New York City ad executive who’d retired to the area introduced her to Kermit Adler, also retired from years as art director, illustrator and vice president at Lord & Taylor, and for a while, art director at Saks Fifth Avenue. Adler was also a watercolor painter and cover designer for Cue magazine, New York's first city magazine and entertainment guide. His wife, Pat, was a co-creative director at L&T. Upon retirement, the couple moved to New Milford, and McRoberts hired Kermit to illustrate for the Barn Shop (with Pat writing the copy) until she closed the shop in 2002.

The ads and original illustrations — a testament to an era of elegance and glamor — were stashed away in a Lord & Taylor shopping bag until recently, when McRoberts showed some of them to her granddaughter.

“She’s of the digital age, but the work spoke to her,” McRoberts relates. “The next thing you know, she takes them all out, laying 69 of them all over the floor and chairs. She said, ‘You have to do something with these.’”

Jeanne McRoberts, center, with her book of Kermit Adler illustrations and two visitors at the opening. Photo credit: Linda Hubbard

Not sure how to proceed, McRoberts hauled her shopping bag of Adler’s work to gallerist Tim Good of the Good Gallery in Kent. He was enthusiastic, prompting McRoberts and her family to put the sketches in context. Earlier, she had started a notebook of the ads and that was the beginning of what became The Art of Fashion in the 1990s: a retrospective of the Barn Shop featuring the illustrations of Kermit Adler.

The book is for sale and the illustrations are now on display at the Kent Art Association, which will receive a portion of the proceeds from the book. The Retrospectives Invitational Show, of which the Adler exhibit is a portion, also includes works by Werner Kappes and Frank Habbas. As McRoberts tells it, the Kent Art Association’s history also chronicles the town’s history, but perhaps that’s for another story. A Venn diagram can only have so many circles.

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Written by
Lisa Green