By Leslie Price
What set you off on this path to writing about Claire McCardell?
When I was in my twenties, I had a job at a museum and they put on an exhibition of Claire McCardell’s clothes. I had never heard of her, and was shocked to learn that a lot of what I had in my closet – wrap dresses, separates, denim, ballet flats, hoodies – she pioneered or invented. I wondered why this woman, who helped invent American fashion in the 1930s and ‘40s, was forgotten.
You had a few questions. One was: How did she achieve what she achieved during this time period? And two: Why do so few people know of her? What did you find?
We don’t know the names of so many pioneering women in history. Why are women forgotten in general? One of the biggest book trends right now is in the forgotten and hidden history of women. Claire isn’t alone. We didn’t tell women’s stories for too long. And now we’re catching up.
She died young. She was in her fifties and at the height of her career. [At that time in] American fashion, there wasn’t a precedent for carrying on the label of a dead ready-to-wear designer. In Paris, France, the couture system was well over a century old. They had a way of understanding the business and the cultural heritage of a brand. But in American sportswear, that didn’t exist yet. I don’t think her business partners understood how to carry on her brand.
You write quite a bit about the rules, both explicit and not explicit, that policed what women were allowed to wear outside the home during Claire’s time. I did not know that women couldn’t go outside without a hat on, or had to wear wool tights to swim in, or how you could be thrown in jail for wearing a suit with pants.
What you see over time in America is dress codes being written into both vice law and municipal codes. You couldn’t go to a public beach as a woman without wearing wool swim stockings. And in the 1920s, Claire was a swimmer. Wool swim stockings were so stupid, you couldn’t swim in them. They were heavy, they were hot. There were women who shattered the norms by going to beaches, taking off their swim stockings, and either being fined or arrested. In some cases, if you wore clothes that weren’t “your gender,” you could also be sent to psychiatric institutions. It wasn’t unheard of, in the late 1800s and early 1900s, for a woman to be sent for psychiatric treatment if she was wearing a suit.
Dress codes happen on many levels. We still see this today, with rules about the length of your skirt or sleeves having to cover your arms. I have a teenage daughter and nobody is policed like teenage girls, especially in a school environment where dress codes absolutely target young women and what they’re allowed to wear or not to wear.
What was it like to be a working woman during Claire’s time, particularly after the Depression?
Her life spans such an interesting series of decades. She’s a teenager in the twenties, and there are freedoms for women that hadn’t existed prior. Women have the right to vote. She went to college, which was not something every woman got to do. She arrives in New York in the twenties. It was difficult being a single woman in a city, because cities weren’t designed for single women. Some of the better hotels wouldn’t rent rooms to a single woman as they were thought to be of ill repute. There were men’s clubs, but there weren’t a lot of places for women to have housing.
She, and her contemporaries who I write about in the book, all had the belief that women were on the ascendance. Of course women were going to be a part of public life. Of course women were going to have careers. They were championing women’s broader role in society.
Claire bucked some of the social pressures of the day. She didn’t get married until later in life. She didn’t have children of her own. But her colleague, Mildred Orrick, took a different path. She wanted a career, but she also got married and had children. How did these differing decisions affect their success?
They had a similar design aesthetic, but Mildred decided to get married and have children, and that affected her ability to work. One of the things I wanted to explore in the book was how McCardell became one of the first women to get her own name on her label, get to the top of her company, and become a partner – all of this at a time when a woman couldn’t have her own bank account. Mildred’s career took a lot of winding stops and starts, and she had to work at night when her kids were asleep. She was deeply affected by following that traditional path of being a wife and a mother. Her career suffered. She told her daughter, Sarah, who I was able to interview for my book, be careful about getting married. She was equally talented, but didn’t have as much success as her friend, in part because she was diverted by children and marriage.
She kept all this stuff by her bed, and she would wake up in the middle of the night with ideas before getting up in the morning and doing it all over again. We’ve all been there. It’s a level of deep, bone-tired exhaustion that is just insane.
McCardell worked hard and was driven, but she also understood that her success relied on her creativity, and she had to tend to it. She always booked vacations after the seasons came out for the clothing industry. Someone like Mildred, who had children, didn’t have the freedom to restore herself and recover in the way that McCardell did.
McCardell wanted to create clothes for women that were comfortable, functional, presentable, and chic. Why is this still so hard to find?
This question was central to my interest in her story: how she understood, and how we all have to grapple with, the reality of getting dressed every day. The reason we’re still struggling is because society and culture has rigid mandates for what people are allowed to wear.
We still gender colors and fabrics. There are still municipal laws on the books that say you can’t wear clothes that are of the sex that you weren’t born to. Look at what’s happening in transgender law right now, and the ways in which people are panicking over [others] dressing the way they want to dress. Every time a woman gets stressed, [it’s because] there’s so much going on in her mind (unconsciously or consciously) about how you appear in society, what people think of you, and how you feel about yourself. We get mixed messages about how we’re supposed to appear. Part of why I felt like Claire’s story was timely is that we’re seeing a regression. Women are being told to give up their careers and be homemakers. We’re seeing it in fashion with the return of corsets, in the tiny wasp waists.
Claire was not just a fashion designer, she was an engineer. She really understood the science of textiles and the geometry of how clothes worked. She understood mass production. There are not a lot of designers or mass manufacturers who have that scope of intelligence about clothes. She also understood the culture and psychology of time and place and how to create clothes that solved problems. I don’t know that every designer is out there looking to solve the problems in the way that a designer like Claire was. I think they’re more interested in selling a trend, in maintaining a brand, in making a splash. There are designers who have that ethos, but it can be harder to get a foot in the fashion industry with that mindset.
She really wanted women to have her clothes for their entire lives. She made it her job to figure out what a woman needed in each season [of her life].
There are so many historical echoes to the present. I read the book during the Bezos wedding, where we saw Lauren Sanchez emerge in a Schiaparelli gown. The waist was tiny. It looked impossible to sit in, or really do anything in. It reminded me of the backlash of Claire’s time, as exemplified by Dior’s New Look.
Her wedding gown was very tight and corseted, too. And we just saw Sabrina Carpenter at the premier of the Men’s Dior collection in an updated version of the New Look. Fashion is a bellwether of larger cultural truths. And right now, we’re seeing a regression to the 18th century.
But people appear to be waking up to the strictures of fashion, how clothes aren’t fitting their bodies. I mean, I’m a woman in my fifties and they’re certainly not designing great clothes for women in their fifties right now. I’ve been heartened to see people defining their own aesthetic and moving away from the trends.
Of course, it doesn’t take away all the pressure, [which includes this trend of] plastic surgery and fillers. It’s not just the clothes that are structured and corseted, it’s our faces, it’s everything. I’d love to say this is something new, but there were women back in Claire’s day that were having ribs removed so that they could be skinnier.
Whenever I read a book about history, I wonder if it will contain information to help me understand the moment I’m living through now – and what might be coming.
Claire lived through the Depression and a World War. Everything was topsy-turvy. There was a big backlash in the ‘50s to women being independent because everybody wanted to return to the idea of a family structure that, in truth, never really existed. There’s an excellent book called The Way We Never Were written by a historian named Stephanie Coontz that really blows the lid off this idea that the June Cleaver-type family.
People are nervous. We have no idea what’s coming. How is AI affecting us? What’s the future of democracy in our country? We’re going through another kind of a revolution, just like the industrial revolution, where technology is changing everything. Of course there’s this grasping for the past. Let’s get back to tradition. Well, what tradition?
Who are Claire’s successors? Donna Karen, with her “seven easy pieces?” Eileen Fisher? Or High Sport, with its similar ethos: to innovate with fabric to create separates that don’t wrinkle, will never be out of style, you can travel in, and can wear into the ground?
The obvious answer is Tory Burch, because she literally re-released Claire-inspired designs in 2022. She has been very vocal about Claire McCardell. She also created a fellowship at the Maryland Center for History and Culture in Baltimore, where I did a lot of my research on Claire and where her archives are, because Burch is interested in fostering the next generation of women entrepreneurs and women fashion designers.
Was there anything about what Claire did that inspired you in your own professional life?
There was a contemporary of Claire’s named Elizabeth Hawes, who is equally interesting and should be better known. She was a designer who wanted to blow the whole system up and wrote scathing books about the fashion industry. There’s a part of me that identifies with Elizabeth. But McCardell understood that, to make change, she needed to work from within, and that there was a limit to one person’s capacity to change an entire industry. What I took from her was the daily diligence and ingenuity of getting it done anyway and creating change from within. She recognized the rules, understood them, and then thwarted them.
Biographies of men tend to vaunt them as solo acts. Steve Jobs was Apple. Well, no, he wasn’t. He was at the top of Apple. I’m interested in the way in which Claire was at the center of a constellation of women who worked together to build an industry. It was the kind of female-led entrepreneurialism that I want to see exist in the world today. I loved how these women developed and created their own systems and network, and worked together and got it done.
The thing that’s disheartening is how we’re still fighting for the same things that McCardell and her cohort were fighting for. She felt like women were on the ascendancy to being true equals. And here we are, still fighting the same fight.