Claire McCardell was born into a world of corsets and bustles and eschewed them to become the single most important designer for American women whose name you never heard of before you read this book. Talk about the erasure of the genius who gave us pockets, separates, jeans, ballet flats, and the ability to carry on in one bag everything we need for a week out of town.
Born in 1905 to a well-to-do family in rural Maryland, the dresses hanging in McCardell’s mother’s closet instilled in her daughter a lifelong fascination with fashion and how it should work for the woman wearing it, as opposed to fashion making the woman work to wear it. She designed and made her first dress at age eleven. Her parents were progressive enough that they insisted she go to college, only drawing the line when she wanted to go to New York City to study art. Or at least they did until she did so poorly at her local college in everything except geometry that her father finally threw in the towel and supported her entry into the New York School of Fine and Applied Art (later and still the Parsons School of Design). It was McCardell’s way in to her real interest, fashion design.
Except that American fashion in the 1920s was led by the nose by French haute couture. Fine, McCardell convinced her parents to further support a year in Paris, although her mother worried that McCardell would fall into the fell habit of drinking French wine. Which, let it be said, she did, all the while infiltrating Vionnet and learning how to cut fabric on the bias.
The effortless elegance was the result of a technique unique to Vionnet. She’d mastered the art of the bias cut. By cutting her fabric on the bias—diagonally at a 45-degree angle against the grain—she enabled the material to flow more fluidly…Vionnet preferred to celebrate a woman’s natural body…[McCardell’s] mind had already leapt to the next thought: How do I make clothes like this?
The year in Paris taught her about haute couture (and also how American designers stole French designs to reproduce at home), but she didn’t return to New York City filled with enthusiasm to recreate it for American women. Haute couture, French and American, was an unaffordable and too often uncomfortable style that forced them to live the life their pricy attire thought they should be living, not to mention forcing them to change clothes five times a day. Instead, McCardell was determined to create inexpensive, mass produced, ready-to-wear fashions that fit actual woman-shaped bodies and were comfortable and more appropriate to the lives they actually lived.
Simplicity in clothes was equally important to McCardell. Men had a practical uniform: the suit. Women, conversely, had housedresses, day dresses, tea dresses, evening gowns. A woman’s wardrobe still largely followed the dictates of her mother’s generation.
It took years to convince employers to feature what they called her “crazies” in their annual lines, until her 1938 Monastic dress outsold everything else on the market that fall.
With the Monastic, McCardell solved for fit and cost. She also offered a solution to what a woman might wear in office settings and public places…The plainness of the dress, far from being a liability as Geiss had originally presumed, was its strength. Women could use it as a blank canvas over which they could layer their own style in the form of accessories…
That year, the least expensive custom-made dress by the American designer Elizabeth Hawes cost $135. McCardell’s dress [at $29.95] was, as one prominent designer later described it, a “luscious bargain.”
In fact, the Monastic turned every woman into her own designer.
It took more years to achieve the recognition of her own name on the labels sewn into the garments she designed, and still more to own her own fashion house. Today she is revered in the world of fashion
In fact, the story of American fashion became constructed on the subsequent generation of men: Halston, Ralph Lauren, Calvin Klein, and Tommy Hilfiger—men who, it should be noted, credit Claire McCardell as their inspiration. “She really invented sportswear, which is this country’s major contribution to fashion,” Calvin Klein said. “She realized that and did it in the 1940s.”
while the larger world has forgotten her name.
Today, it is difficult to find a pristine, original Claire McCardell outside a museum. Over the years, women rarely mothballed her clothes; they wore them to threads.
I wear jeans nearly every day of my life. There are no dresses or high heels in my closet, but there are dress slacks with pockets and ballet flat dress shoes. Until I read this book I had no idea who I owed that to. Thanks, Claire.
Written in a brisk, reportorial style based in large part on McCardell’s own records and letters, and very much worth reading.
Her hometown of Frederick, Maryland hasn’t forgotten her, as they put up a statue of her in 2021. Be worth the trip to make my thanks in person.
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