\u00a0Meet the most influential clothier you\u2019ve never heard of.\u202f<\/p>\n
Women might be surprised to learn that much of what hangs in their closets \u2014 the leotards and leggings, hoodies, denim jackets, leather skirts, dresses with pockets, side zippers and ballet flats \u2014 was designed by a woman they\u2019ve never heard of.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
Yes, even the jersey wrap dress.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
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.\u202f\u00a0<\/p>\n
As an unknown designer, McCardell made a monkey out of Christian Dior, with his padded shoulders, tightly cinched waists and teetering high heels, trumpeted in 1946 as his \u201cNew Look\u201d for women. Unimpressed by the French maestro, McCardell cut her ready-to-wear garments to fit a woman\u2019s natural shape, making Dior\u2019s wasp waists look like skeletal twists.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
Betty Friedan agreed. Years before she rattled America with \u201cThe Feminine Mystique,\u201d Friedan wrote a 1955 magazine profile of McCardell: \u201cThe Gal Who Defied Dior.\u201d That same year, McCardell made the cover of Time. Yet it\u2019s Dior whose name reigns in fashion today, while McCardell and her creations faded after her death in 1958.\u202f\u00a0<\/p>\n
But now comes glory for the forgotten fashionista in a sparkling tribute by Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson, who\u2019s written \u201cClaire McCardell: The Designer Who Set Women Free.\u201d\u202f\u00a0<\/p>\n
Growing up in Frederick, Maryland, a tomboy who played 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.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
McCardell set sail for Paris for a junior year abroad studying the intricacies of haute couture. At 23, she returned to New York City, determined to make a career in fashion. After modeling sportswear at B. Altman and Company for $25 a week, she 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. She bounced back weeks later, finding another job on Seventh Avenue and starting at the bottom of the pay pole.\u202f\u00a0<\/p>\n
Blessed by the gods of career girls, McCardell gradually soared; she knew what she wanted to do and never stopped chasing her goal. Having decided she didn\u2019t want to have children or become a housewife, she postponed marriage for many years to bring her designs to the world. Psychologically, she needed to work. \u201cWithout it,\u201d Dickinson writes, \u201cshe wasn\u2019t sure who she was.\u201d\u202f\u00a0<\/p>\n
A practical woman, McCardell used her own experiences to fuel her designs. For instance, whenever she traveled to Paris on a buying trip, she grew frustrated having to lug a 100-pound steamer trunk full of clothes from her apartment to the Hudson River docks and then onto \u2014 and, later, off of \u2014 an ocean liner. So she devised a system of five different garments made of crease-free jersey that she could fit into a single suitcase and interchange while traveling. Such a system of separates was unheard of in 1934, but it would revolutionize American fashion 50 years later.\u202f\u00a0<\/p>\n
Next, McCardell designed the \u201cMonastic dress,\u201d a tentlike garment with dolman sleeves, belted with thin ties that wrapped multiple times around the waist. The frock \u2014 which freed women from corsets, girdles and crinoline \u2014 sold out its first day in stores. Then the clever designer conceived the \u201cPop-over dress\u201d as something fashionable women could wear while cleaning the house before popping over to a cocktail party. The Pop-over cost $6.95 in 1942, sold more than 75,000 in its first season and won McCardell a Coty Award.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
On a creative blitz, she also designed the \u201cDiaper bathing suit\u201d and Capezio ballet flats, while putting 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 France\u2019s fashion dominance.\u202f\u00a0<\/p>\n
In this achievement, McCardell was surprisingly aided by New York\u2019s 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, leading months later to the creation of the New York Dress Institute, which protected and promoted American clothiers\u2019 designs.\u202f\u00a0<\/p>\n
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\u2019ll care about a designer you\u2019ve 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 \u201cClaire McCardell Clothes by Townley.\u201d\u202f\u00a0<\/p>\n
McCardell was only 52 when she died of colon cancer, but in her lifetime she ingeniously transformed the needle trade into the fashion industry and left an indelible mark on American design. She finally gets her crown in Dickinson\u2019s delightful biography.\u202f\u00a0<\/p>\n
Georgetown resident Kitty Kelley has written several best-sellers, including \u201cThe Family: The Real Story Behind the Bush Dynasty.\u201d Recent books include \u201cLet Freedom Ring: Stanley Tretick\u2019s Iconic Images of the March on Washington.\u201d She serves on the board of BIO (Biographers International Organization) and Washington Independent Review of Books, where this review first appeared.\u202f\u00a0<\/p>\n
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\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\ttagsbook review<\/a>kitty kelley<\/a>Kitty Kelley Book Club<\/a>\u2018Claire McCardell: The Designer Who Set Women Free\u2019<\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u00a0Meet the most influential clothier you\u2019ve never heard of.\u202f Women might be surprised to learn that much of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":66806,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[353,49,48,75],"class_list":{"0":"post-66805","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-ca","10":"tag-canada","11":"tag-entertainment"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66805","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=66805"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66805\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/66806"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=66805"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=66805"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=66805"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}