Introducing Claire McCardell

Some readers may be quite familiar with this lady, but a recent article in The Atlantic was my introduction to her.

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...

McCardell insisted on putting pockets in women’s clothing; previously, pockets were reserved almost exclusively for men... 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.

More at the link.  I don't plan to read the book and won't be reviewing it here, but I'm introducing her and the book because I'm sure this is the type of fashion designer my pragmatic mother would have loved.