Latest news with #ClaireMcCardell
Daily Mail
a day ago
- Lifestyle
- Daily Mail
Fashion's most influential woman you've never heard of... and the designers who have been stealing from her ever since
Every time a woman puts her hands in her pockets, zips up the side of her pants, or belts the waist of her wrap dress, she owes a debt of gratitude to someone she has likely never heard of. That someone is Claire McCardell. She was once one of the most influential and famous fashion designers in the world. When she died in 1958, the New York Times ran her obituary on their front page and hailed her as the 'All-American designer for the All-American girl.' Yet despite having more of an impact on women's lives than Coco Chanel and Christian Dior combined, McCardell has been largely forgotten – a name familiar only to the fashion cognoscenti and design historians. Author Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson is determined to change that. She is seeking to reinstate McCardell in the pantheon of designer greats with her new book, ' Claire McCardell: The Designer Who Set Women Free.' Because, according to Evitts Dickinson, what McCardell did entirely reinvented the way women dress. Coming to prominence in the 1930s and 1940s, the designer recognized that women's lives were changing. They were living, moving and working in a modern world. McCardell turned up her nose at corsetry, high heels and delicate fabrics, and espoused a feminist philosophy that translated into designs she believed a liberated woman would want to wear. 'You have to design for the lives American women lead today,' she noted in an interview with feminist writer Betty Friedan in 1947. McCardell was born in 1905 in the quiet hamlet of Frederick, Maryland. The daughter of a banker and housewife, as a girl, she railed against the restrictions of female clothing that made climbing trees and stashing apples almost impossible. She majored in home economics for two years at nearby Hood College before making the bold leap to New York City to earn a degree from the New York School of Fine and Applied Art (now Parsons The New School for Design). A stint in Paris followed and convinced McCardell that American women deserved better than the poor imitations of Parisian haute couture that filled US stores. McCardell believed they needed clothes that reflected the pioneering spirit embodied by Charles Lindbergh, who she watched land at Le Bourget Airport on 21 May 1927 after his historic solo non-stop flight from New York to Paris. Returning to New York and its Seventh Avenue design district – the hub of American fashion production – McCardell secured a job at Townley Frocks, then one of the leading garment manufacturers. During her tenure she fought for the inclusion of many of what we now consider staple features in womenswear. Pockets rather than purses was an essential ethos in the McCardell worldview. Not content with male-driven view that they made the female figure look fat, the designer argued pockets were a necessity for women whose presence in the modern American workforce was becoming ever more important. Closures were next on her list. Without a husband or maid, how could a woman, McCardell argued, fasten her dress? Without further ado she shifted the zipper on her pieces from the back to the side. That change embodied how the designer believed women should be allowed to dress – 'independent clothes for the independent working gal,' she proclaimed. According to her boss at Townley, her pleated 'monastic dress,' created in 1938, looked terrible on the hanger but, when belted at the waist with its spaghetti style ties – another of McCardell's innovations – it embodied functional elegance that made it an immediate bestseller when it hit the ready-to-wear racks. Four years later, McCardell bested her own record for success when, in 1942, she created the cotton 'Popover' wrap dress. It was marketed to American consumers as the 'original utility fashion' and sold for $6.95. The dress was originally made from inexpensive cotton, which McCardell later switched out for denim – a bold move and a novel use of a fabric previously considered the reserve of menswear. Thirty years before Diane Von Furstenberg repurposed the wrap dress into one made from jersey – claiming she had launched not just a revolution but a symbol of sartorial female independence – McCardell's 'Popover' gave women the benefit of looking good while still being functional. Lord and Taylor, the famed but now defunct department store, gave the dress an entire window display in its flagship store on New York's Fifth Avenue. One fashion journalist described the life-altering garment as 'so glamorous that Fifth Avenue and the farm united in their acceptance of it.' A staggering 75,000 dresses were sold in the first six months, earning McCardell not just fame but her place as the preeminent arbiter of female fashion. Cut off from the leadership of Parisian fashion houses due to World War II and facing the challenges of wartime shortages, she was allowed to flex the muscles of innovation without the backlash of the conservative male voices that still dominated American fashion. Trousers with pleats, and yes pockets, became de rigueur for a newly functional face of the female workforce, who also found in McCardell's love of hoods a practical replacement for hats which remained in place only with uncomfortable and unstable pins. Leggings and other sportswear separates quickly became part of the McCardell repertoire. Faced with a shortage of leather due to wartime rationing, she had the perfect excuse to abandon the high heel, which she had long thought impractical for a working woman. She pivoted to the ballet flat – soles made of rubber and the shoe made from a fabric matching her designs. Though she sparked a trend that still flourishes today, her rival Coco Chanel is the one who gets all the credit, despite the fact the French designer didn't launch her own version until 1957. Trousers with pleats, and yes pockets, became de rigueur for a newly functional face of the female workforce (Pictured: McCardell's trousers in a Neiman Marcus ad) Four years later, McCardell bested her own record for success when, in 1942, she created the cotton 'Popover' wrap dress (pictured) Thirty years before Diane Von Furstenberg repurposed the wrap dress into one made from jersey, McCardell's 'Popover' gave women the benefit of looking good while still being functional But, while McCardell thrived during the war with her penchant for utilitarianism, she found herself distinctly out of step with a post-war return to the whimsy of impractical glamor. In February 1947, Christian Dior debuted the 'New Look.' Padded shoulders, tightly corseted waists, high heels and impossibly full skirts, filled out a collection that was the antithesis of all that McCardell had worked for in her now two-decade career. Romantic and ethereal, Dior's designs captured a much-needed emotional rejuvenation after the deprivation of the wartime years. The post-war resurgence of French couture was still in full swing when, in 1958, McCardell died at the age of just 52. Buyers of the American fashion emporiums had returned to copying Parisian couture and American talent lay dormant for nearly two decades until a new wave of designers – such as Calvin Klein, von Furstenberg, Halston, Donna Karen and Ralph Lauren – emerged. But it wasn't just the mood of the time that contributed to McCardell's fall from favor. In truth, she contributed to the end of her own line for the simple reason that, unlike Chanel and Dior, she did not designate a successor. Head designer, Yves Saint Laurent, carried the Dior label to greatness following Christian Dior's death in 1957. But McCardell's label, whose ownership reverted to her Maryland-based non-fashion family, died just a few months after she did. As a consequence, few acknowledge McCardell's place as one of history's fashion greats. Does Anna Wintour even know her name? Maybe, but my hunch is probably not. For a woman who has championed fashion at its most exclusive, restrictive and expensive, Wintour would surely find little to admire in McCardell's functional utilitarian designs. But the reemergence of McCardell's name is a timely reminder that the history of dress is ultimately shaped by how the majority of women have lived in and loved their clothes. Because she may not have been embraced by the fashion glitterati, but McCardell's legacy is alive and well – and it's woven into the fabric of every woman's wardrobe today.
Wall Street Journal
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Wall Street Journal
‘Claire McCardell' Review: Practical Elegance
In the 2022 exhibition 'In America: An Anthology of Fashion,' staged in the American Wing period rooms at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, one tableau stood out from the rest. Framed in the meditative Shaker Retiring Room (ca. 1835), flooded with warm light, five mannequins wore dresses designed between 1938 and 1949, all of them the work of one woman. Here was the dawn of American sportswear. In the seeming simplicity of their problem solving and their honest use of buttons, belts and drawstrings, these garments, by the American phenom Claire McCardell (1905-58), clearly share the Shakers' values. Yet in their lean lines and rejection of froufrou, and in their sturdy materials with built-in wear, they are unquestionably midcentury modern. McCardell dropped into the rag-trade ecosystem in 1929, when big-fish suits were forcing backroom guppies to copy Parisian trends. She proceeded to ignore Paris, instead absorbing American ideals into affordable fashions for the Everywoman. She was not so much a bomb going off as a stealthy tectonic shift. But bombs get more attention. While McCardell is revered by fashion scholars and a continuing cycle of designers she's inspired (for instance Tory Burch, Donna Karan, Calvin Klein, Isaac Mizrahi), there are many in the general public—fashionistas and design hounds among them—who don't know her name or its significance. The discontinuation of her label, following her death from colon cancer at the age of 52, began the erasure. Which is why Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson's 'Claire McCardell: The Designer Who Set Women Free'—the first comprehensive McCardell biography—is so welcome. This book, Ms. Dickinson's first, grew out of a 2018 feature the journalist wrote for the Washington Post Magazine—an 80th-anniversary tribute to McCardell's breakthrough, her 1938 Monastic dress. Based on an Algerian robe, it was shaped like a tent and cut on the bias; add a belt and the folds could be arranged to flatter every figure. The dress would be a perennial must-have with many variations.
Atlantic
01-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Atlantic
It Has Pockets!
Claire McCardell hated being uncomfortable. This was true long before she became one of America's most famous fashion designers in the 1950s, her influence felt in every woman's wardrobe, her face on the cover of Time magazine. As a young girl growing up in Maryland, she hated wearing a dress when climbing trees, and didn't understand why she couldn't wear pants with pockets like her brothers—she had nowhere to put the apples she picked. At summer camp, she loathed swimming in the cumbersome full-length stockings women were expected to wear, so she ditched hers and went bare-legged in the lake, even though she knew she'd get in trouble. When she was just starting out as a fashion designer, in the 1930s, she went on a ski trip to New Hampshire and one evening saw a woman shivering in a thin satin dress. Why, McCardell wondered, couldn't an evening gown be made out of something warmer, so a woman could actually enjoy herself? McCardell made a career out of asking such questions, and helped transform American fashion in the process, as Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson details in her lively and psychologically astute biography, Claire McCardell: The Designer Who Set Women Free. The young designer who came home from New Hampshire and devised a blue wool evening dress was often dismissed by her bosses for her 'crazy' ideas—wool was for coats, not parties! She was told to keep copying the latest looks from Paris, as was customary in the American garment trade at the time. In those early years, McCardell didn't have the clout to design apparel her way. But she had a core conviction, and she never abandoned it: Women deserve to be comfortable—in their clothes, and in the world. Almost a century later, 'we owe much of what hangs in our closets to Claire McCardell,' Dickinson writes, and yet she is not among the fashion figures 'we all remember.' That's an understatement. How is it that McCardell, once a household name, is now known only to fashion cognoscenti and costume historians? Dickinson offers a portrait of a revolutionary, if a private and pragmatic one, and examining McCardell's story helps expand our sense of what revolution can look like. A glance at a list of McCardell's innovations provides a crash course in just how limited—and limiting—fashion options once were for American women. McCardell insisted on putting pockets in women's clothing; previously, pockets were reserved almost exclusively for men. (McCardell knew that pockets were good for more than holding things—they could help, she once wrote, if you were 'standing in front of your boss's desk trying to look casual and composed.') She put fasteners on the side of her clothes rather than the back, so women could get dressed without a husband or a maid. She partnered with Capezio to popularize the ballet flat—and the idea that women didn't always have to wear heels. When air travel became possible, and steamer trunks were replaced with slim suitcases, McCardell developed separates: tops and bottoms you could mix and match so that you didn't have to bring a bulky parade of dresses for every occasion. She patented the wrap dress, mainstreamed the leotard, stripped linings out of swimsuits so that women didn't have to sit sodden and cold on the beach. Ever worn denim? McCardell is the one who ignored its provenance as a humble workingman's textile and brought it to women's wear. These ideas won McCardell early acclaim and autonomy, and though she died young (in her early 50s, of colon cancer, in 1958), she was a dominant force in American fashion for nearly 20 years. At 27, she earned the title of head designer at Townley Frocks; at 35, she negotiated to get her name on the label. She was free to unleash her most unorthodox ideas (one boss called them crazy so many times that she began wryly referring to her favorite concepts as 'my crazies'). And because they were in fact quite sensible, many of them were commercial hits. She was hailed not just as a progenitor of the 'American Look' but as an arbiter of American preferences: By the 1950s, she was regularly enlisted to endorse a wide spectrum of products, including playing cards, hair dye—even bourbon. When McCardell died, her New York Times obituary ran on the front page. From her birth, in Frederick, Maryland, in 1905, she didn't lack for life's comforts, financial or otherwise, and was given unusual opportunities, as Dickinson's thoroughly researched account makes clear. McCardell's family was prosperous; her grandfather ran a candy business, her father was a banker, and her mother could afford regular trips to the local general store for fabric and seasonal visits from a seamstress who let a curious young McCardell watch every stitch she made. Fortunately, her parents believed in education for women, and they eventually agreed to supplement her stint at nearby Hood College, where she reluctantly studied home economics: In 1925, she enrolled at the New York School of Fine and Applied Art (which later became the Parsons School of Design) and headed off to study clothing illustration in New York and Paris. What stands out in Dickinson's account is McCardell's clarity of vision, even early on. When her angora sweater left squiggles of lint on her high-school date's suit, she made note: Good clothes shouldn't create nagging little embarrassments. When she was studying in Paris and got possession of a discounted dress by the couturier Madeleine Vionnet, she immediately 'took a seam ripper to it,' Dickinson writes, dismantling the precious garment so that she could understand it better, then sewing it together again. When she was back in New York, McCardell, lanky and confident, found work as a model at B. Altman, showcasing dresses on the shop floor. She ditched the prim and regal posture common at the time and walked instead with a casual, loping slouch that made each outfit look easy and appealing. Shoppers bought what she wore. (McCardell is still sometimes credited as the originator of the way models walk today.) McCardell never approved of the then-prevailing practice of copying French designs. In the early 20th century, French designers would release new looks each season, and American merchandisers would either purchase originals to imitate, license designs they were allowed to copy, or (more often) send young women to sketch and steal the French ideas, whether from seasonal shows in Paris or from American department stores. For McCardell, the theft rankled. When one of her first bosses sent her to surreptitiously sketch French designs at Bergdorf Goodman, she snuck out to a Central Park bench to draw from her imagination instead. She also saw that copying the French was producing a lot of bad clothes. French haute couture was custom-made, but by the 1920s, more and more American clothes were manufactured at scale and sold ready-to-wear. That meant fine French details—such as a carefully set shoulder or a delicate row of functional buttons—could be only clumsily reproduced. The effect was gawky at best, and it reinforced McCardell's focus on developing a new fashion vernacular. The question was how to get her bosses to listen. In Dickinson's telling, Dale Carnegie himself helped McCardell cultivate her powers of persuasion. McCardell first heard Carnegie's self-improvement spiel at a gathering of the Fashion Group, a trade association for women in the industry, and then signed up for courses at his Institute of Effective Speaking. Just after these lessons, in 1938, she scored her first big win. (Dickinson can't resist extracting perhaps too-tidy significance from other encounters with 20th-century heroes as well: When McCardell watches Charles Lindbergh's plane land in Paris after his pioneering transatlantic flight, for example, she finds her faith in American pluck and ingenuity buoyed.) Carnegie-inspired or not, McCardell's first triumph came when she was lead designer at Townley, constantly battling pushback from her boss there, Henry Geiss. He fought her on pockets. When she declined to include shoulder pads, the French vogue, he had the workroom tuck them in later. Her newest idea: a voluminous dress, narrow at the shoulders and wide at the hem, simple to cut and easy to manufacture, that could be belted in a number of ways and would be flattering to women of all shapes and sizes. When a woman wore it, she felt effortless, elegant, and free. On the hanger, though, it looked like a sack. Geiss said it would never sell and refused to include it in the line. And so, Dickinson recounts, on the day a buyer from Best & Co., a New York department store, was in the showroom, McCardell turned up in her own trapeze-style dress, cut in a rich red wool, and strode through bearing coffee as the buyer was packing up. 'You didn't show me that one,' the buyer from Best & Co. said, and ordered 100 on the spot. (Whether this encounter was coincidence or contrived is open to interpretation, and Dickinson acknowledges in a footnote that the tale has 'several versions'; she relies on her archival work and the analysis of previous biographers to support the staged-coffee-run version of events.) However it was discovered, the dress, which became known as the ' Monastic ' because its loose cut recalled a monk's robe, sold out in a day and became a national sensation. 'Geiss is such a dope,' McCardell told her friends. Soon after, Townley went out of business: Geiss had spent a year in combat with copycats rather than encouraging McCardell to come up with the next great idea. A year later, he revived the brand with a new partner, Adolph Klein, and asked McCardell to return. When she insisted on having her name on the label, and final say on the designs, Klein and Geiss agreed. The year was 1940. The Germans had invaded France, Parisian fashion had shut down, and manufacturers and merchandisers were wondering: Could America get dressed by itself? McCardell thrived because of her timing, and because her new partner, Klein, was a marketing whiz who knew how to sell her distinctive designs. It may have helped, too, that she waited until she was established to marry and never had children of her own. But she succeeded above all because she never stopped thinking about how her customers would feel in their clothes. 'When you're uncomfortable, you are likely to show it,' she told a radio interviewer in 1947. Clothes should be easy to wear, 'so there is no temptation to be forever pulling, pinching, and adjusting them, which spoils your own fun and makes everyone else fidgety. You never look really well-dressed when you're over-conscious of what you have on.' Fashion historians tend to agree that McCardell had a distinctively elegant and inventive knack for bringing American women new freedom of movement. She rejected anything restricting—even when Christian Dior burst onto the French scene with his 'New Look' after World War II and began trussing women back into corsets with 18-inch waists. Dior described women as flowers, to be admired and plucked. McCardell saw women as doers, and designed accordingly. She often used kimono or dolman sleeves, favoring the loose arm openings that allowed a woman to 'raise her arm above her head to hold a strap on the subway or hail a taxi without worrying about ripping a seam,' as Dickinson writes. Her cuts were unusual and modern, which is why costume institutes prize her work and fashion instructors still pore over her techniques. Whether McCardell was really 'the designer who set women free' in a broader sense is a more complicated question. During McCardell's lifetime, women certainly gained sartorial freedom: more casual and comfortable options; more economical ones; more revealing ones; and in general, more choice about how they might acceptably present themselves to the world. But McCardell was part of a cohort of American designers who helped invent American sportswear—casual clothes suited to Americans' active lives. Dickinson carefully nods at this landscape, introducing us to other influential innovators in fashion such as the Lord & Taylor executive Dorothy Shaver, who featured female American designers' lines in her store windows long before McCardell made her name. The 1955 Time cover story that featured McCardell cites a list of even more forgotten peers who were pushing fashion forward as well, none of whom gets more than scant mention in Dickinson's account: Sydney Wragge, who is also sometimes credited with inventing modern separates; Clare Potter, who popularized two-piece swimsuits; Vera Maxwell, who also thought clothes should be comfortable; Carolyn Schnurer, who told The New York Times that pockets give women 'something to do with their hands.' Perhaps McCardell is best thought of not as a singular visionary but as a leading voice in a chorus of designers, all responding to the growth of mass manufacturing; to the uniquely American assumption—both democratic and consumerist—that women up and down the income scale deserved to dress well; and to the huge opportunity presented when France went dark during the war. The changing lives of American women gave rise to the demand for these new clothes, and if McCardell had not existed, another talent would no doubt have seized the moment. That doesn't make her any less of a revolutionary, and she is semiregularly reexamined by the fashion world because her geometrically novel designs appeal to the eye in different eras. Three years ago, Tory Burch launched a collection inspired by McCardell and wrote the foreword to a rerelease of What Shall I Wear?, a fashion-advice book that McCardell published (and wrote at least some of) in 1956. The real reason the larger world doesn't know McCardell's name is that, unlike her rival and contemporary Christian Dior, she did not designate a successor or make any plan for her line to continue after her death. Dior also died at 52, just a few months before McCardell, having appointed Yves Saint Laurent to carry on his work and safeguard his name. But it's worth considering what a fashion legacy entails: Do we know Dior's name because we understand his art? Or have we merely seen it on the side of sunglasses and in bus-shelter perfume ads? Perhaps fashion is better understood not as art, but as a form of industrial design. I don't know the name of the man who invented the potato peeler, but I benefit from his efforts at least twice a week. McCardell fought for recognition in her lifetime, but she seemed to want it less for glory and more because it gave her the power to operate as she liked. She might take a look at our modern closets, our ballet flats and wrap dresses, separates and side zippers, and conclude that she did enough, whether we know her name or not. But McCardell is worth remembering as an example of the persistence called for, in any field, to see the world as it is—and to fight for the world as it should be. In 2021, her hometown in Maryland installed a statue of her in a local park. She slouches in her signature posture, confident and at ease, leaning back against a dressmaker's form. It's striking to see an official statue that looks so relaxed; she's not staring at the horizon as though meeting the queen, or setting the coordinates for an artillery attack. She looks, above all, comfortable.
Time of India
27-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Time of India
Claire McCardell: The woman who gave us dresses with pockets (and made fashion actually comfy)
Representational image Claire McCardell wasn't about stiff dresses, painful waistbands, or rules that made getting dressed a drag. While the fashion world in her time was busy obsessing over Parisian glamour, Claire kept things real. She designed clothes for actual women—women who moved, worked, cooked, chased kids, and needed to breathe. She didn't try to dress women like Hollywood stars. She dressed them like themselves. And that's what made her iconic. Comfort was her superpower Born in Maryland in 1905, Claire studied fashion in New York and even had a stint in Paris. But instead of copying French trends, she asked the real question: What do women actually want to wear? Her answer? Clothes that feel good and let you live your life. She used fabrics like cotton, jersey, and denim—stuff that felt nice on the skin and could be tossed in the wash. She ditched the fussy buttons for zippers, skipped the shoulder pads, and gave us deep, glorious pockets. For Claire, comfort didn't mean boring—it meant beautiful and real. The dress that did it all One of her most famous creations? The 'Popover' dress. It was a wrap dress that worked for everything—cooking, working, lounging, or heading out. It even came with a matching potholder. Functional, affordable, and super cute. Women loved it because it made life easier—not harder. And those comfy ballet flats everyone still wears? Yeah, Claire had a hand in that too. She thought high heels were overrated (same), so she designed shoes that looked stylish and let you catch a bus or walk around the city without crying in pain. Clothes that got you Claire wasn't in it for fame. She didn't care about being flashy. What she cared about was making sure women felt good in what they wore. 'I've designed clothes that make people feel relaxed and comfortable,' she once said. And she meant it. She created fashion that respected women's lives. Her designs were for the multitasking queens—working, cooking, parenting, commuting, and still showing up for dinner looking fab. Her legacy lives on Claire passed away in 1958, but her influence is everywhere. Every time you reach for a wrap dress, slide on ballet flats, or get excited about a dress with actual pockets, that's Claire. She didn't need a spotlight—her designs spoke for themselves. Her designs weren't just clothes—they were tools for everyday life. They helped women move freely, express themselves, and stay comfortable doing it all. That's why even her simple changes, like including pockets (which most modern designers still forget!), felt revolutionary. It's like she understood how clothing could be empowering without needing to scream 'power suit.' She proved that fashion doesn't have to be complicated to matter. Sometimes, the simplest outfits are the most powerful. Today, Claire McCardell is finally getting her flowers again. Designers often cite her as a quiet genius who changed the way we think about fashion. Brands are still borrowing (okay, stealing) her wrap dresses, ballet flats, and sporty-meets-elegant silhouettes. So the next time someone acts like comfort and fashion don't mix? Just remind them that Claire McCardell was doing "chic and comfy" way before it was cool. She didn't just design clothes—she designed freedom. And every woman who's ever breathed easier in a soft dress or strutted in flats without pain? Yeah, we owe her.
Washington Post
19-06-2025
- Lifestyle
- Washington Post
A century ago, this designer set women free. And gave them pockets.
Claire McCardell, forgotten by too many, is the ingenious designer who understood that women could be comfortable and stylish. Imagine that. Naturally, she was an American, born in Frederick, Maryland, in 1905. McCardell put women in ballet slippers, denim, leggings, modern bathing suits, dolman sleeves, leotards and wrap dresses (decades before Diane von Furstenberg). She gave women pockets, which had long been deemed unseemly in female attire, even empowering and dangerous, as they could conceal love letters, money, a pistol. Nobel Prizes have been bestowed for less.
