‘Walking Alongside’ American Designer Claire McCardell in New Book

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‘Walking Alongside’ American Designer Claire McCardell in New Book

Rosemary Feitelberg · WWD

Tue, Jun 10, 2025 ·

7 min read

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"Good fashion earns its right to be remembered."

Those words weren't just spoken by Claire McCardell, but she lived up to them too. Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson's new book, "Claire McCardell: The Designer Who Set Women Free," spells that out again and again. Progressive as a working woman, McCardell helped to pioneer American fashion, after studying at Parsons and living in Paris for a stretch. Her specialty was practical, stylish, affordable clothes that women could move through their days. McCardell's breakthrough look in 1938 was the Monastic dress, which flattered a range of body types.

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Ballet flats, separates, the shirtwaist dress, spaghetti straps on evening gowns, strapless swimsuits and athletic-friendly designs were among her creations. She also made leotards popular. As McCardell told Betty Friedan in her magazine writing days, "You have to design for the lives American women lead today."

Claire McCardell

While many associate sportswear with the second generations designers like Calvin Klein, Halston and Donna Karan, the author noted how McCardell forged the path. Although her label was not carried forward after her death in 1958 at the age of 52, Dickinson said the lack of the magnitude of her influence was more due to "the societal clapback about women being at the forefront of the industry. We've forgotten a lot of those women's names unfairly," she said.

Dickinson said, "She never wanted to be out of the trenches. She enjoyed the work. Even when she was famous enough, well-off enough and partner in her firm, it was suggested that she take a step back, [but] that never appealed to her. She really was an inventor and an artist."

As much about McCardell's life as it is about her career, the Simon & Schuster biography will be released June 17. Dickinson will speak Thursday at a ticketed event at the New York Historical, which will be followed by a book launch at the Maryland Center for History and Culture on June 17 and an appearance at the Frenchtown Bookshop in Frenchtown, N.J., on June 24.

Claire McCardell was noted for her sportswear fashion designs. She particularly designed for the average woman. She designed for Hattie Carnegie and Townley Frocks.

Reading McCardell's writing, transcribing McCardell's archival letters and "triangulating" them to cultural events and geographic locations enabled Dickinson to hear her voice and visualize her life at that time. Esoteric as that might sound, the author manages to relay McCardell's upbringing, career, marriage and pursuits with historical footnotes and entertaining asides. "I wanted it to feel like you were walking alongside McCardell and not like you were spending time with a biographer telling you about her."

Pragmatism was paramount to all that she did. Dickinson said, "She always had the lived experience of the woman in mind so that everything she was designing had a reason. She really wanted to be remembered for making clothes that changed people's lives and helped women to be more autonomous, ambitious, comfortable and confident."

Those reasons were aplenty such as creating a detachable hood to replace the hassle of traveling on an airplane with a hat, designing pockets to stash fidgety hands when speaking to her boss and generously cut dresses to allow subway riders to grab a straphanger without tearing her clothes. "She was always thinking about the reality of living and moving through the world as a woman," Dickinson said.

The new biography involved two years of research.

While working at what is now known as the Maryland Center for History and Culture in the late 1990s, the author's first encounter with the designer was through an exhibition. Fresh out of college with no idea of who McCardell was or that she was one of the reasons behind much of what hangs in our closets, Dickinson said, "I knew very little about the sportswear movement, and the women like Claire, who in the 1920s and '30s, were really building American fashion. I remember standing there in a really unfortunate suit that I'd been talked into buying by a salesperson. We've all been there. It doesn't fit. It's not comfortable. The color is trendy, but it's not good on you. And it didn't have pockets," she recalled. "I remember thinking, 'How did we go backward?'"

Moreover, Dickinson questioned how the industry appears to have slid back again with men being installed as the creative directors of luxury houses — including Dior, Chanel and Gucci. But back to McCardell. What hooked the author was how McCardell's show made her question what women are expected to wear, why that is the case and who is dictating those mandates. "Whose gaze are we prioritizing? Claire always prioritized the female gaze, the wearer," Dickinson said.

Claire McCardell posing in front of a wall of her press clippings.

The fact that women were "pretty much required" to wear wool swim stockings on public beaches in the 1920s to avoid the seeming indecency of bare legs, was news to the author. McCardell's daringness, as a teenager, to take her swim stockings off to take a plunge endeared her to the author. "I loved that she was trying to push back on things that she thought were unreasonable," Dickinson said.

Another revelation in her research was just how difficult it was for a young single woman to maneuver her way around New York City without a male escort. "I was fascinated to learn how art clubs and other places [like the Fashion Group International] emerged to support women like Claire and how Claire, in turn, tried to help other women throughout her career to find their footing in the city and in the industry," she said.

Readers will learn how the designer was at the nexus of a constellation of a lot of extraordinary women and entrepreneurs [like Elizabeth Hawes, Eleanor Lambert and Bonnie Cashin]. "This really is the story of a group of women working together to build an industry," Dickinson said. "She was often years ahead of her time. She invented separates in 1934 and she kept at it, so that by the 1940s she got them out there. As one person I interviewed said, 'She is one of the most under appreciated, but important designers of the 20th century."

McCardell also approached her collection tactically. So much so that she once deconstructed a Vionnet dress that she bought at a Paris sample sale in the 1920s to get a better understanding of how it was made. That was all the more telling, given that American design students at that time were learning more about how to draw clothes than how they worked, Dickinson said. McCardell's personal archives include reams of letters from not just fans, the famous and customers. Amongst them was a lengthy handwritten one in which the writer said a McCardell suit failed her during an Italian vacation that she had saved up to go on for years. Dickinson said, "I think she saved it to remind herself, who she worked for. She surely went back to [review] the design, to the manufacturer and to the fabric to figure out how to fix it."

Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson

When World War II called for rationing, McCardell made the most of every scrap of fabric for her designs, and used innovative aspects like mattress ticking and parachute materials that were left over from the military, Dickinson noted. At the request of Harper's Bazaar's editors Diana Vreeland and Carmel Snow, she created a design for American women whose lives had been upended with some pitching in with the war effort while also running their households. The "Popover" dress in durable cotton that McCardell came up with had an oven mitt attached at the waist. More than 50,000 units of the New York made frock were sold in 1942.

The designer was also a witness to history, having been one of the last designers to leave Paris before it fell to German troops. She also connected with leaders in the arts like Ernest Hemingway, and the actress Joan Crawford, who "begged" the designer in letters to make clothes for her. And the artist Georgia O'Keefe wore her clothes. At heart, McCardell was an artist and an inventor, according to the author. To that end, the designer once said, "I've always designed things I needed myself. It just turns out that other people need them too."

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