‘Claire McCardell' Review: Practical Elegance

Wall Street Journal

20 hours ago

In the 2022 exhibition 'In America: An Anthology of Fashion,' staged in the American Wing period rooms at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, one tableau stood out from the rest. Framed in the meditative Shaker Retiring Room (ca. 1835), flooded with warm light, five mannequins wore dresses designed between 1938 and 1949, all of them the work of one woman. Here was the dawn of American sportswear.
In the seeming simplicity of their problem solving and their honest use of buttons, belts and drawstrings, these garments, by the American phenom Claire McCardell (1905-58), clearly share the Shakers' values. Yet in their lean lines and rejection of froufrou, and in their sturdy materials with built-in wear, they are unquestionably midcentury modern. McCardell dropped into the rag-trade ecosystem in 1929, when big-fish suits were forcing backroom guppies to copy Parisian trends. She proceeded to ignore Paris, instead absorbing American ideals into affordable fashions for the Everywoman. She was not so much a bomb going off as a stealthy tectonic shift.
But bombs get more attention. While McCardell is revered by fashion scholars and a continuing cycle of designers she's inspired (for instance Tory Burch, Donna Karan, Calvin Klein, Isaac Mizrahi), there are many in the general public—fashionistas and design hounds among them—who don't know her name or its significance. The discontinuation of her label, following her death from colon cancer at the age of 52, began the erasure. Which is why Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson's 'Claire McCardell: The Designer Who Set Women Free'—the first comprehensive McCardell biography—is so welcome.
This book, Ms. Dickinson's first, grew out of a 2018 feature the journalist wrote for the Washington Post Magazine—an 80th-anniversary tribute to McCardell's breakthrough, her 1938 Monastic dress. Based on an Algerian robe, it was shaped like a tent and cut on the bias; add a belt and the folds could be arranged to flatter every figure. The dress would be a perennial must-have with many variations.