Nelly Don: A Stitch in Time

For more than sixty years, Nelly Don reigned as our country's leading designer in women's dresses known for their quality, style and affordability.

Nelly Don was a beautiful woman who, in 1916, rejected the Mother-Hubbard housedresses middle class women were resigned to wearing. With encouragement from family and friends, Nell convinced Peck's Dry Goods Store in downtown Kansas City to order 18 dozen dresses.

Those dresses sold out the first morning they went on sale launching the internationally famous Nelly Don dress line. In just a few years, Nelly Don was producing more than 5-thousand dresses a day making Nell Donnelly one of the most important forces in women's fashions in the 20th century.

More than three years in the making, the documentary movie features 16mm film of Nelly Don models from the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s. The book begins with a parade of Nelly Don fashions through the decades. The film and book also give a complete accounting of how Kansas City Gangsters rescued Nelly Don when she was kidnapped in 1931, the affair Nell had with Sen. James A. Reed from which a child was born, the Union battles Nelly Don waged against the International Ladies Garment Workers Union and the kind and progressive leadership that endeared Nell to thousands of Kansas City women who worked for Nelly Don for many years.

"The legend of this progressive woman was slowly fading into obscurity," said filmmaker and author Terence O'Malley. "My goal in producing the film and writing the book has been to memorialize as completely as possible the glamour, fashion, romance, politics, crime and mystique that comprise the story of Nelly Don."

The feature-length documentary film NELLY DON: A STITCH IN TIME premiered at the Screenland Theater in May of 2006 and became one of the longest running films in Kansas City history.

The book and DVD are available through the award-winning Nelly Don website www.NellyDon.com.

Nelly Don: Just Try One on!