CLAIRE MCCARDELL: The Designer Who Set Women Free, by Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson
Several years ago, I began to worry that my clothes were making me depressed. I’d gained weight during the pandemic, and shopping online for my new shape was time-consuming and expensive. When I’d luck into a garment that felt good but looked off, or had those useless shallow pockets — two knuckles deep, one house key wide — I’d tell myself it didn’t matter. Aren’t middle-aged women invisible anyhow?
Besides, functional pockets are scarce in women’s clothing because they “ruin the silhouette,” or so I’d heard. (Hence the more-than-century-long crusade for pocket parity.)
When I read Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson’s exceptional biography, “Claire McCardell,” my angst turned into … indignation. The problem isn’t my body. Or the false promises of online commerce. It’s a bazillion-dollar global fashion industry that ignores the midcentury mastermind of American sportswear, among our most significant cultural exports.
Many of McCardell’s contributions to women’s ready-to-wear clothing remain in circulation — including ballet flats, leggings, hoodies and spaghetti straps. But vanishingly few of the designers who’ve come after embody her driving ethos: Women’s clothes can be practical, comfortable, stylish and affordable. And have pockets.
As Dickinson writes, “Stitching Claire McCardell’s name back onto the apparel she pioneered is not merely a history lesson in provenance; it is a vital and timely reminder of a designer, and a movement, that was always about far more than clothes.”
In McCardell’s own words: “Men are free of the clothes problem — why shouldn’t I follow their example?”
Born in Maryland in 1905, McCardell came of age with the right to vote, while still risking opprobrium for wearing pants in public.
An early fascination with clothes, and a keen sensitivity to the paradoxes of getting dressed, led her to study fashion in 1920s Manhattan and Paris. “Capitalism boomed aboveground as speakeasies fueled the madcap energy from below,” Dickinson writes, setting the scene for a young designer who balanced marketplace demands and creative expression.
McCardell’s best template was herself. Unlike her flapper peers, she eschewed makeup, kept her hair long and raced between Broadway shows and jazz clubs wearing sweaters, tweed skirts and Mary Janes — a practical uniform contemporary readers might appreciate.
Like her subject, Dickinson thrives on the limits of her craft. McCardell never met her fellow expat Ernest Hemingway, but Dickinson highlights the resonance, noting that “the novel, like clothing, was being reinvented.”
After graduating from Parsons in 1928, McCardell bounced through design-adjacent jobs (including modeling and painting lampshades) before landing at Townley Frocks, a garment district manufacturer.
In 1938, McCardell created her first big hit, the “monastic” dress. On a hanger, the shapeless swath had all the panache of a flour sack. Slip it on, add a belt and it was everything a woman could want. It sold out in a heartbeat. It also spawned a legion of dupes, foreshadowing the types of legal/copyright technicalities that helped to erase McCardell from the popular consciousness.
As a devotee of the wrap dress, I was amazed to learn that McCardell was the first to make it fashionable, in 1942, in response to a challenge set by the Harper’s Bazaar editor Diana Vreeland. For only $6.95, a woman could toss on her easy-to-wash wraparound denim “Pop-over,” take the kids to school, hurry through housework and meet a friend for lunch. No handbag necessary; remove the matching oven mitt, and the giant patch pocket could hold a novel, wallet, house keys. The design was so successful that McCardell included a pocketed wrap dress in every collection thereafter.
To think that I’d believed what I’d been told: that Diane von Furstenberg invented that one-and-done marvel in the 1970s, so working women could go straight from the office to cocktails. In fact, she added iterations: slinky, body-hugging fabrics with deep, cleavage-baring V-necks.
After the “Pop-over” took off, McCardell became a household name. Lauren Bacall wore her pleated slacks. Georgia O’Keeffe was a superfan who not only painted in her McCardell dresses but chose to be photographed wearing one. In 1955, McCardell was the first American fashion designer to grace the cover of Time magazine. In 1956, she published her first book, “What Shall I Wear?” And then, two years later, at 52, she succumbed to colon cancer.
Fashion historians have gone to great lengths to preserve McCardell’s legacy. Thanks to their efforts, more than a few museums hold her clothes — including The New York Historical, where the “Pop-over” dress is on view through September.
Dickinson’s book is the linchpin I didn’t know I needed, the first cradle-to-grave biography of McCardell written for a general audience. In a 2024 Instagram post, Dickinson says she initially encountered McCardell in 1998, while working at the Maryland Center for History and Culture (M.C.H.C.), the same year McCardell’s brothers donated a trove of their sister’s possessions.
Drawing on those archives, and much more, Dickinson weaves a dynamic and immersive narrative, reconstructing McCardell’s time and place with the vivid immediacy necessary to fully appreciate her genius. At last, we have everything there is to know about McCardell — the woman, and the designer — under one cover.
The designer Tory Burch made use of those same M.C.H.C. archives to develop her Spring/Summer 2022 collection. Why yes, while writing this review I did buy a Tory Burch Claire McCardell dress, in a versatile ditsy monochrome. Secondhand. For research. It feels and looks as good as I’d hoped.
Scientists have a term for how clothes make us think, feel and behave: “enclothed cognition.” The symbolism of a white lab coat, they discovered in 2012, measurably improves the wearer’s ability to concentrate. Like anyone endowed with extrasensory sartorial perception, I’ve spent a lifetime researching the causal relationship between my moods and whatever I put on that morning.
Now that I know McCardell was the patron saint of this mind-clothing connection, I fervently hope that Dickinson’s marvelous, necessary book will return her to the mainstream.
CLAIRE MCCARDELL: The Designer Who Set Women Free | By Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson | Simon & Schuster | 328 pp. | $29.99
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