Clare McCardell
by Kitty Kelley
Women might be surprised to learn that much of what hangs in their closets was designed by a woman they’ve never heard of — the leotards and leggings, hoodies, denim jackets, leather skirts, dresses with pockets, side zippers, and ballet flats. Yes, even the jersey wrap dress. All this time, you thought it was Diane von Furstenberg who gave you an hourglass figure in the 1970s. Actually, DvF simply resurrected and glamorized what Claire McCardell had already made into a wardrobe staple decades before.
As an unknown designer, McCardell made a monkey out of Christian Dior, with his padded shoulders, tightly cinched waists, and teetering high heels, which he trumpeted in 1946 as his “New Look” for women. Unimpressed by the French maestro, McCardell cut her ready-to-wear garments to fit a woman’s natural shape, making Dior’s wasp-waists look like skeletal twists. Betty Friedan agreed, and years before she rattled America with The Feminine Mystique, she wrote a 1955 magazine profile of McCardell entitled “The Gal Who Defied Dior.” That same year, McCardell made the cover of Time. Yet it’s Dior whose name reigns in fashion today, while McCardell and her creations faded after her death in 1958.
But now comes glory for the forgotten fashionista in a sparkling tribute by Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson, who’s written Claire McCardell: The Designer Who Set Women Free.
Growing up as a tomboy in Frederick, Maryland, playing with her brothers, McCardell refused to be encumbered by the hoops and stays and bones and wires of her era. She began making her own simple clothes as a youngster and would eventually graduate from the New York School of Fine and Applied Art, later known as Parsons School of Design. Spending her junior year abroad, she set sail for Paris to study the intricacies of haute couture. At the age of 23, McCardell returned to New York City determined to make a career in fashion. She modeled sportswear at B. Altman and Company for $25 a week and then landed a job sketching ready-to-wear designs, but with no real experience and unable to keep up with production, she was fired in 1929. But she bounced back weeks later, found another job on Seventh Avenue, and started at the bottom of the pay pole.
McCardell was blessed by the gods of career girls and gradually soared because she knew what she wanted to do and never stopped chasing her goal. Having decided she didn’t want to have children or become a housewife, she postponed marriage for many years so she could bring her designs to the world. Psychologically, she needed to work. “Without it,” Dickinson writes, “she wasn’t sure who she was.”
A practical woman, McCardell used her own experiences to fuel her designs. For instance, she grew frustrated having to lug a 100-pound steamer trunk full of clothes from her apartment to the docks of the Hudson River and then onto (and, later, off of) an ocean liner every time she traveled to Paris on a buying trip. So she devised a system of five different garments made of crease-free jersey that she could interchange while traveling and that fit into a single suitcase. Such a system of separates was unheard of in 1934, but it would revolutionize American fashion 50 years later.
Next, McCardell designed the “Monastic dress,” a tent-like garment with dolman sleeves and belted with thin ties that wrapped multiple times around the waist. The frock — which freed women from corsets, girdles, and crinoline — sold out its first day in stores. Then, the clever designer conceived the “Pop-over dress” as something fashionable women could wear while cleaning the house before they popped over to a cocktail party. The Pop-over cost $6.95 in 1942, sold more than 75,000 in its first season, and won a Coty Award for McCardell. On a creative blitz, she also designed the “Diaper bathing suit” and Capezio ballet flats, and she put pockets in everything from capris to evening gowns. She moved zippers to the side of garments instead of the back so women could dress themselves without assistance. In doing so, she invented American sportswear for women and pushed the ascent of American design, which eventually challenged the fashion dominance of France.
In this achievement, McCardell was surprisingly aided by New York’s mayor, Fiorello La Guardia, who summoned a group of fashion journalists to educate him about the industry. After listening to the women, the mayor vowed to help build an organization to foster American fashion, which led, months later, to the creation of the New York Dress Institute, which protected and promoted the designs of American clothiers.
Who knew U.S. designers would come to owe so much to McCardell? But such is the charm of this book and its author that you’ll care about a designer you’ve never heard of, who became the first American to get her name on a Seventh Avenue label. Years before Ralph Lauren, Oscar de la Renta, Calvin Klein, Anne Fogarty, Anne Klein, Donna Karan, Bonnie Cashin, Tory Burch, or Lilly Pulitzer, there was “Claire McCardell Clothes by Townley.”
Crossposted with Washington Independent Review of Books