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.
Almost a century later, “we owe much of what hangs in our closets to Claire McCardell,” Dickinson writes, and yet she is not among the fashion figures “we all remember.” That’s an understatement. How is it that McCardell, once a household name, is now known only to fashion cognoscenti and costume historians? Dickinson offers a portrait of a revolutionary, if a private and pragmatic one, and examining McCardell’s story helps expand our sense of what revolution can look like.
A glance at a list of McCardell’s innovations provides a crash course in just how limited—and limiting—fashion options once were for American women. McCardell insisted on putting pockets in women’s clothing; previously, pockets were reserved almost exclusively for men. (McCardell knew that pockets were good for more than holding things—they could help, she once wrote, if you were “standing in front of your boss’s desk trying to look casual and composed.”) 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.
These ideas won McCardell early acclaim and autonomy, and though she died young (in her early 50s, of colon cancer, in 1958), she was a dominant force in American fashion for nearly 20 years. At 27, she earned the title of head designer at Townley Frocks; at 35, she negotiated to get her name on the label. She was free to unleash her most unorthodox ideas (one boss called them crazy so many times that she began wryly referring to her favorite concepts as “my crazies”). And because they were in fact quite sensible, many of them were commercial hits. She was hailed not just as a progenitor of the “American Look” but as an arbiter of American preferences: By the 1950s, she was regularly enlisted to endorse a wide spectrum of products, including playing cards, hair dye—even bourbon. When McCardell died, her New York Times obituary ran on the front page.
From her birth, in Frederick, Maryland, in 1905, she didn’t lack for life’s comforts, financial or otherwise, and was given unusual opportunities, as Dickinson’s thoroughly researched account makes clear. McCardell’s family was prosperous; her grandfather ran a candy business, her father was a banker, and her mother could afford regular trips to the local general store for fabric and seasonal visits from a seamstress who let a curious young McCardell watch every stitch she made. Fortunately, her parents believed in education for women, and they eventually agreed to supplement her stint at nearby Hood College, where she reluctantly studied home economics: In 1925, she enrolled at the New York School of Fine and Applied Art (which later became the Parsons School of Design) and headed off to study clothing illustration in New York and Paris.
What stands out in Dickinson’s account is McCardell’s clarity of vision, even early on. When her angora sweater left squiggles of lint on her high-school date’s suit, she made note: Good clothes shouldn’t create nagging little embarrassments. When she was studying in Paris and got possession of a discounted dress by the couturier Madeleine Vionnet, she immediately “took a seam ripper to it,” Dickinson writes, dismantling the precious garment so that she could understand it better, then sewing it together again. When she was back in New York, McCardell, lanky and confident, found work as a model at B. Altman, showcasing dresses on the shop floor. She ditched the prim and regal posture common at the time and walked instead with a casual, loping slouch that made each outfit look easy and appealing. Shoppers bought what she wore. (McCardell is still sometimes credited as the originator of the way models walk today.)
McCardell never approved of the then-prevailing practice of copying French designs. In the early 20th century, French designers would release new looks each season, and American merchandisers would either purchase originals to imitate, license designs they were allowed to copy, or (more often) send young women to sketch and steal the French ideas, whether from seasonal shows in Paris or from American department stores. For McCardell, the theft rankled. When one of her first bosses sent her to surreptitiously sketch French designs at Bergdorf Goodman, she snuck out to a Central Park bench to draw from her imagination instead.
She also saw that copying the French was producing a lot of bad clothes. French haute couture was custom-made, but by the 1920s, more and more American clothes were manufactured at scale and sold ready-to-wear. That meant fine French details—such as a carefully set shoulder or a delicate row of functional buttons—could be only clumsily reproduced. The effect was gawky at best, and it reinforced McCardell’s focus on developing a new fashion vernacular. The question was how to get her bosses to listen.
In Dickinson’s telling, Dale Carnegie himself helped McCardell cultivate her powers of persuasion. McCardell first heard Carnegie’s self-improvement spiel at a gathering of the Fashion Group, a trade association for women in the industry, and then signed up for courses at his Institute of Effective Speaking. Just after these lessons, in 1938, she scored her first big win. (Dickinson can’t resist extracting perhaps too-tidy significance from other encounters with 20th-century heroes as well: When McCardell watches Charles Lindbergh’s plane land in Paris after his pioneering transatlantic flight, for example, she finds her faith in American pluck and ingenuity buoyed.)
Carnegie-inspired or not, McCardell’s first triumph came when she was lead designer at Townley, constantly battling pushback from her boss there, Henry Geiss. He fought her on pockets. When she declined to include shoulder pads, the French vogue, he had the workroom tuck them in later. Her newest idea: a voluminous dress, narrow at the shoulders and wide at the hem, simple to cut and easy to manufacture, that could be belted in a number of ways and would be flattering to women of all shapes and sizes. When a woman wore it, she felt effortless, elegant, and free. On the hanger, though, it looked like a sack. Geiss said it would never sell and refused to include it in the line.
And so, Dickinson recounts, on the day a buyer from Best & Co., a New York department store, was in the showroom, McCardell turned up in her own trapeze-style dress, cut in a rich red wool, and strode through bearing coffee as the buyer was packing up. “You didn’t show me that one,” the buyer from Best & Co. said, and ordered 100 on the spot. (Whether this encounter was coincidence or contrived is open to interpretation, and Dickinson acknowledges in a footnote that the tale has “several versions”; she relies on her archival work and the analysis of previous biographers to support the staged-coffee-run version of events.) However it was discovered, the dress, which became known as the “Monastic” because its loose cut recalled a monk’s robe, sold out in a day and became a national sensation. “Geiss is such a dope,” McCardell told her friends.
Soon after, Townley went out of business: Geiss had spent a year in combat with copycats rather than encouraging McCardell to come up with the next great idea. A year later, he revived the brand with a new partner, Adolph Klein, and asked McCardell to return. When she insisted on having her name on the label, and final say on the designs, Klein and Geiss agreed. The year was 1940. The Germans had invaded France, Parisian fashion had shut down, and manufacturers and merchandisers were wondering: Could America get dressed by itself?
McCardell thrived because of her timing, and because her new partner, Klein, was a marketing whiz who knew how to sell her distinctive designs. It may have helped, too, that she waited until she was established to marry and never had children of her own. But she succeeded above all because she never stopped thinking about how her customers would feel in their clothes. “When you’re uncomfortable, you are likely to show it,” she told a radio interviewer in 1947. Clothes should be easy to wear, “so there is no temptation to be forever pulling, pinching, and adjusting them, which spoils your own fun and makes everyone else fidgety. You never look really well-dressed when you’re over-conscious of what you have on.”
Fashion historians tend to agree that McCardell had a distinctively elegant and inventive knack for bringing American women new freedom of movement. She rejected anything restricting—even when Christian Dior burst onto the French scene with his “New Look” after World War II and began trussing women back into corsets with 18-inch waists. Dior described women as flowers, to be admired and plucked. McCardell saw women as doers, and designed accordingly. She often used kimono or dolman sleeves, favoring the loose arm openings that allowed a woman to “raise her arm above her head to hold a strap on the subway or hail a taxi without worrying about ripping a seam,” as Dickinson writes. Her cuts were unusual and modern, which is why costume institutes prize her work and fashion instructors still pore over her techniques.
Whether McCardell was really “the designer who set women free” in a broader sense is a more complicated question. During McCardell’s lifetime, women certainly gained sartorial freedom: more casual and comfortable options; more economical ones; more revealing ones; and in general, more choice about how they might acceptably present themselves to the world. But McCardell was part of a cohort of American designers who helped invent American sportswear—casual clothes suited to Americans’ active lives. Dickinson carefully nods at this landscape, introducing us to other influential innovators in fashion such as the Lord & Taylor executive Dorothy Shaver, who featured female American designers’ lines in her store windows long before McCardell made her name. The 1955 Time cover story that featured McCardell cites a list of even more forgotten peers who were pushing fashion forward as well, none of whom gets more than scant mention in Dickinson’s account: Sydney Wragge, who is also sometimes credited with inventing modern separates; Clare Potter, who popularized two-piece swimsuits; Vera Maxwell, who also thought clothes should be comfortable; Carolyn Schnurer, who told The New York Times that pockets give women “something to do with their hands.”
Perhaps McCardell is best thought of not as a singular visionary but as a leading voice in a chorus of designers, all responding to the growth of mass manufacturing; to the uniquely American assumption—both democratic and consumerist—that women up and down the income scale deserved to dress well; and to the huge opportunity presented when France went dark during the war. The changing lives of American women gave rise to the demand for these new clothes, and if McCardell had not existed, another talent would no doubt have seized the moment.
That doesn’t make her any less of a revolutionary, and she is semiregularly reexamined by the fashion world because her geometrically novel designs appeal to the eye in different eras. Three years ago, Tory Burch launched a collection inspired by McCardell and wrote the foreword to a rerelease of What Shall I Wear?, a fashion-advice book that McCardell published (and wrote at least some of) in 1956.
The real reason the larger world doesn’t know McCardell’s name is that, unlike her rival and contemporary Christian Dior, she did not designate a successor or make any plan for her line to continue after her death. Dior also died at 52, just a few months before McCardell, having appointed Yves Saint Laurent to carry on his work and safeguard his name. But it’s worth considering what a fashion legacy entails: Do we know Dior’s name because we understand his art? Or have we merely seen it on the side of sunglasses and in bus-shelter perfume ads?
Perhaps fashion is better understood not as art, but as a form of industrial design. I don’t know the name of the man who invented the potato peeler, but I benefit from his efforts at least twice a week. McCardell fought for recognition in her lifetime, but she seemed to want it less for glory and more because it gave her the power to operate as she liked. She might take a look at our modern closets, our ballet flats and wrap dresses, separates and side zippers, and conclude that she did enough, whether we know her name or not.
But McCardell is worth remembering as an example of the persistence called for, in any field, to see the world as it is—and to fight for the world as it should be. In 2021, her hometown in Maryland installed a statue of her in a local park. She slouches in her signature posture, confident and at ease, leaning back against a dressmaker’s form. It’s striking to see an official statue that looks so relaxed; she’s not staring at the horizon as though meeting the queen, or setting the coordinates for an artillery attack. She looks, above all, comfortable.
This article appears in the August 2025 print edition with the headline “It Has Pockets!”
The post It Has Pockets! appeared first on The Atlantic.
