Pod Insights Articles of Interest The Great American Designer About this episode The USA is a young country, but our fashion design is even younger. Like who are the titans of American fashion design? It’s Donna Karan, Tommy Hilfiger, Calvin Klein, Ralph Lauren...these designers who are all still alive.
And if you want to look at where these titans of American fashion design got it all from, there was a great American fashion designer who many of them were looking towards.
To see Claire McCardell's incredible modern fashions for yourself, head to articlesofinterest.substack.com https://articlesofinterest.substack.com/
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Avery Trufelman? France has its elegant couture from its established ateliers. And Italy has its craftsmanship in its storied houses. But America has brands, brands that make mass-produced, casual, sporty, comfortable clothing for everyone. And we're a young country, but when you think about it, our fashion design history is even younger. Like, who are the titans of American fashion design? It's Donna Karen, Tommy Hilfiger, Calvin Klein, Ralph Lauren, these designers who are all still alive. But if you want to look at where these great fashion designers got it all from, there was a great American fashion designer who many of them were looking to.
0:45 Speaker 01 Calvin Klein, I quote in the book, like, he said, "She's the one who did it. She's the one who set the stage and set the standard."
0:51 Avery Trufelman? This is journalist Elizabeth Everts-Dickinson. We were speaking live onstage at the New York Historical for this interview, hence the little stagey echo. And we were talking about this designer who made so many of the classics of the American wardrobe.
1:04 Speaker 01 This was a woman who was responsible for much of what was in my closet: ballet flats, mix-and-match separates, wrap dresses, denim and women's wear, hoodies. And I was shocked that I had never heard her name.
1:18 Avery Trufelman? Her name was Claire McCardell. And Elizabeth wrote a brilliant book about her called Claire McCardell: The Designer Who Set Women Free.
1:27 Speaker 01 And if you talk to designers today, many of them will say that Claire McCardell is part of their design inspiration, whether that's Anna Sui, who I've talked to about her, or Michael Kors, or Tori Burch.
1:39 Avery Trufelman? Claire McCardell was doing what many of those designers were doing decades earlier. All of her clothes you could wear today. Claire made halter tops and wrap dresses and leotards and pants with big, practical pockets, generally very cute, totally modern clothes that women would love to wear now.
1:57 Avery Trufelman? But they were designed at a very different time. Like, this is a designer who was born in 1905.
2:08 Speaker 01 You had boning in your bodice and you had crinolens.
2:12 Avery Trufelman? Claire grew up in an era when clothes were worn completely differently.
2:17 Speaker 01 You had one dress for when you were asleep and you had another dress for when you were doing your house chores. And then you had a day dress and that involved a corset.
2:25 Avery Trufelman? And sure, by the time Claire was studying at Parsons, it was the 1920s. Women were starting to get rid of corsets and stuff like that. But for a while, she was still wearing poofy crinoline underskirts.
2:37 Speaker 01 Like, her quote was, "I don't hate crinolens. I just hate when they try and get into an elevator." Because, like, what when we're being asked to wear? You couldn't get into a cab. You couldn't ride the subway. You couldn't get into an elevator.
2:49 Avery Trufelman? And it's not like Claire could just wear pants. She legally couldn't.
2:53 Speaker 01 There were municipal laws. There were vice codes about what you were allowed to wear and not to wear. And a lot of this was about gendering fashion, right? If you were not wearing what was considered appropriate to your gender, you could go to jail.
3:09 Avery Trufelman? I mean, there were other ones. I kept, like, going through the book. Like, new laws kept popping up all the time. It's like, well, women were required to wear a hat. It's like, seriously? When they went swimming, they had to wear swim stockings. It's like, are you kidding me? Like, there's so many things that they had to wear and keep track of at risk of being fined or put in jail. And this lasted kind of a long time. It wasn't just like, oh, when she was a little kid. It was like, in her lifetime. I mean, one of my favorite slash least favorite stories was about the kindergarten teacher in Los Angeles. Can you tell me that one?
3:47 Speaker 01 This was in the 30s, around the time that Claire was just starting to really break out with this unstructured, comfortable sportswear. There was this woman across the coast who got robbed. She was held up and she was at court to testify against the men who robbed her. But the judge was more concerned by the fact that she was wearing pants. And he said she needed to go home and change into a dress. And she refused, and he jailed her.
4:14 Avery Trufelman? I forget this. Being a woman was a very different experience in the early 20th century.
4:19 Speaker 01 There weren't even women's rooms in most public buildings at the time.
4:23 Avery Trufelman? When Claire McCardell left her home in Maryland to move to New York City, it wasn't like being Carrie Bradshaw.
4:28 Speaker 01 If you were a single woman trying to come to the city, there was no place for you to live.
4:33 Avery Trufelman? Women couldn't rent a hotel room because then it was thought you were a prostitute. So women usually had to live in boarding houses with very strict rules and early curfews, like you were a kid.
4:44 Speaker 01 I mean, you still had to have a male signature to get a checking account. You still had to have a male escort to get into restaurants.
4:51 Avery Trufelman? So Claire McCardell was amazing. She was a woman at a time when it was exceedingly difficult just to be a woman. But also, she had her name on a line of clothing when American fashion design hardly existed.
5:08 Speaker 01 There was no such thing as a fashion designer in New York.
5:11 Avery Trufelman? The fashion designers were in France. New York was where the factories were.
5:16 Speaker 01 The garment district was thriving, but it was primarily a manufacturing hub for churning out Parisian copies.
5:23 Avery Trufelman? In New York, they were supposed to be making knockoffs of the French silk gowns. They weren't supposed to be making the sort of cute, practical clothes that Claire wanted to make. And yet.
5:35 Speaker 01 A lot of what she created in the 1930s and 40s really laid the foundation for modern, ready-to-wear American clothing.
5:44 Avery Trufelman? So how did Claire McCardell beat the odds? In a time when women couldn't do anything and American fashion designers didn't exist, how did she become the great American fashion designer? And create so much of what's in our closets? And go on to inspire generations of American designers after her? And yet, still, somehow, for a time, gets so thoroughly forgotten.
6:14 Avery Trufelman? After the break.
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8:11 Avery Trufelman? That's therealreal.com articals to get your $25 off. Start shopping now at therealreal.com slash articles. The American look was this wholesome, sporty, mass-produced style for the wholesome, sporty, modern woman. And it was pioneered by a whole cohort of designers like Elizabeth Hawes and Bonnie Cashin and Zelda Winvaldez. Many of these designers were women, many of them were Black women. But none were as famous as Claire McCardell.
8:44 Speaker 03 So this is our Claire McCardell collection?
8:47 Avery Trufelman? In her lifetime, Claire McCardell was really, really famous.
8:51 Speaker 03 Just the sheer amount of press that we're looking at here speaks to her presence within American fashion at the time. We're looking at like five linear feet of material that are just Claire's press clippings.
9:03 Avery Trufelman? I got a tour through the library of the Fashion Institute of Technology from April Callahan, who you might recognize as the co-host of Dressed, the fantastic podcast about fashion. In her old day job, April was the Special Collections Associate at FIT, which has this great collection of Claire McCardell clippings. Oh, that is so cute. Oh, my God, I love that look. And that was Claire?
9:24 Speaker 03 Yeah, I mean, these are Claire's designs. She did model her own designs, though, quite frequently.
9:28 Avery Trufelman? Claire McCardell was even on the cover of Time Magazine in 1955. She was a constant source of public fascination. Is this a profile of her?
9:37 Speaker 03 Yeah, from Vogue.
9:38 Avery Trufelman? Claire McCardell is the Europeans' version of the typical American girl, whom you never saw but read about in print. Now we know who that girl was, the one who shared top billing with your beautiful, tall buildings. It was Claire McCardell, I shall make your point. Claire McCardell was sort of the ideal American. She was tall and broad-shouldered and spunky, and she had this sort of can-do attitude. And she never really fit in with her time. Like, she always wore her hair long, regardless of what everyone else was doing. Like, even in the 1930s and 40s, when everybody else had their hair short, she was always doing her own thing. So her clothes also were always hearty and spunky and timeless and always very, very practical, even when they were elegant.
10:20 Speaker 03 This is a classic Claire. It has a scoop neckline, very simple but very elegant. It could be a sundress, but it could also be an evening gown.
10:28 Avery Trufelman? Or here's another classic Claire.
10:30 Speaker 03 What's so Claire about this skirt, or the two patch pockets on the front?
10:33 Avery Trufelman? Big pockets.
10:33 Speaker 03 Right? So the stripes on the skirt are running vertical, but the pockets are running horizontally. So it's like this very simple...
10:42 Speaker 01 Design element. That's smart.
10:44 Avery Trufelman? A spunky, clever, all-American style by a spunky, clever, all-American girl. And Claire was always called a girl.
10:55 Speaker 01 Every article I read that was written in her lifetime basically called her a girl.
10:59 Avery Trufelman? Author Elizabeth Ebbets Dickinson again.
11:01 Speaker 01 She was still called a girl at 50.
11:03 Avery Trufelman? So that girl thing is, of course, super condescending. And it's really different from the refined lady designers of Europe, like Coco Chanel or Elsa Schiaparelli. But Claire McCardell also had a really different approach than they did. Claire had this more youthful, exuberant quality to her. She was always more of a tomboy.
11:24 Speaker 01 I think that growing up in rural Maryland with three brothers helped a lot because she was out running around in the countryside. And she had this great quote that said, "A dress can be pretty, but climbing a tree in it, forget it."
11:36 Avery Trufelman? From a young age, Claire understood that her brothers could do things that she couldn't, in part because of what they wore.
11:43 Speaker 01 Claire said, "I want to go to New York after high school." And she's like, "I want to make clothes."
11:47 Avery Trufelman? Claire's father was baffled and would not allow it. And I see where he was coming from. The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire had just happened. The garment industry in New York was not a glamorous thing. It was a dangerous thing.
12:01 Speaker 01 She eventually wore her parents down and was on a train up to Parsons.
12:05 Avery Trufelman? And because, as you know, at the time, there were very few places that a young woman could live alone in New York City, Claire stayed in a place called the Three Arts Club.
12:15 Speaker 01 And the Three Arts Club was meant for women, any age, really. It wasn't just for college students, but there were a lot of college students there. And she had a safe place to live and come home to every night.
12:25 Avery Trufelman? And the Three Arts Club ended up being really vital for Claire's career because another woman who lived at the Three Arts Club connected Claire with a manufacturer and a designer. Named Robert Turk.
12:37 Speaker 01 And it's interesting because when I read originally about Robert Turk, I thought he was decades older than Claire because the way that magazine articles and newspaper articles at the time discuss a young man as being already fully formed and made, and I was shocked to learn they were like a few years apart in age.
12:57 Avery Trufelman? And Claire was being called like a gal. But anyway, Claire began working with Turk.
13:01 Speaker 01 Turk was this young man who was very entrepreneurial, started his own line. And what Turk was doing was he was copying Paris like every other designer.
13:11 Avery Trufelman? In the United States, everyone copied Paris. That's just what was done. But there were two ways to copy the designs from Paris.
13:17 Speaker 01 The legal way to do it was you licensed it.
13:19 Avery Trufelman? You could work with the couture house to buy an edition of a design to make a licensed copy. This is what a lot of department stores did, but-
13:28 Speaker 01 The way everybody really did it in New York was they stole it.
13:31 Avery Trufelman? New York designers would just go to a Paris runway show and memorize what they saw.
13:36 Speaker 01 And then you would go back out and you would quickly sketch it. And then the buyers and the department store owners would take it and copy it.
13:44 Avery Trufelman? Claire hated this.
13:47 Speaker 01 She did not love the copying. She didn't like the stealing. It made her deeply uncomfortable.
13:51 Avery Trufelman? She was often told to go to Bergdorf's or Bloomingdale's and quote unquote, "shop the store."
13:57 Speaker 01 And what that meant was the manufacturers would send their young designers into the department stores to steal the licensed Parisian designs.
14:06 Avery Trufelman? She was spying, basically.
14:07 Speaker 01 And she didn't want to do it. She was like not happy. And so she left and she went and sat on a bench and she just made up her own drawings and slid them into the stack.
14:17 Avery Trufelman? Claire never admitted she had made up her own designs, but Turk just quietly put her in charge of the sample room instead of sending her out to be a spy again. He just made Claire the head of production and never said why.
14:31 Speaker 01 Where he differed from everyone else is he took her seriously and he trained her and he showed her the ropes.
14:37 Avery Trufelman? Robert Turk recognized Claire's talent. In a world where women were usually left out of any sort of mentorship opportunities, Robert Turk really took her under his wing.
14:47 Speaker 01 And because of that, she started to really understand the business. Of fashion.
14:53 Avery Trufelman? And then, life is so wild. The Great Depression hit, and in 1931, Robert Turk sells his company to another company called Townley.
15:01 Speaker 01 Townley was this big sportswear manufacturer.
15:05 Avery Trufelman? So they've sold out now. Robert Turk and Claire McCardell are working for this big company called Townley.
15:10 Speaker 01 The head of Townley was like such from Central Casting. His name was Henry Geis. He was described as a harassed veteran of 7th Avenue.
15:18 Avery Trufelman? Geis did not care about beautiful clothes. He wanted to make good numbers.
15:22 Speaker 01 He was not interested in original designs. He wanted what was gonna sell. You know, just put a bow on it, was what he would say.
15:30 Avery Trufelman? And then, right in the middle of a collection for this big new manufacturer, Robert Turk dies.
15:37 Speaker 01 He does.
15:38 Avery Trufelman? In this really tragic accident.
15:40 Speaker 01 He basically drowned trying to save his brother.
15:42 Avery Trufelman? Turk had taken his 11-year-old brother swimming and died on the eve of his 29th birthday.
15:50 Speaker 01 So Turk dies suddenly in the middle of a collection. Geis had no choice. He had no choice. He had to turn to Turk's assistant.
15:59 Avery Trufelman? Who is, of course, this 27-year-old girl, Claire McCardell. She had to finish the collection.
16:06 Speaker 01 And she pulled it off. And she pulled it off beautifully. And then she became a head designer.
16:12 Avery Trufelman? Claire became the head designer of Townley-Frocks, which is really impressive. But of course, Geis was not interested in Claire's original designs.
16:21 Speaker 01 She was still told that she needed to copy Paris.
16:24 Avery Trufelman? Even though Claire was begging Geis to let her design clothes that were more dynamic and more wearable, with more pockets.
16:30 Speaker 01 She was always dressing for her own needs as a modern woman in New York, a career girl. Literally that idea of I need to go from morning to night in the same dress and get on the subway. But what she started to do was she started to wear her own clothes.
16:44 Avery Trufelman? Just wearing her own clothes around to work at Townley-Frocks. And that was how, in 1938, Claire had her first breakout design.
16:54 Speaker 01 And the only reason it was sold was because she wore it to work one day and accidentally bumped into the buyer from the department store vesting company.
17:01 Avery Trufelman? And this dress that this buyer saw Claire wearing was unlike any he had ever seen before.
17:07 Speaker 01 And what was so revolutionary about this dress is this one manufacturer said, my god, it has no front. It has no back. Where do you zip it? It had no structure.
17:17 Avery Trufelman? This dress would be called. The monastic dress.
17:21 Speaker 01 Her famous monastic dress was almost like a monk's cassock because you could belt it and fit it to your own body.
17:29 Speaker 04 The monastic is a dress that would go over your head, so we might think of it as a tent dress.
17:34 Avery Trufelman? This is sewing expert and fashion historian Julie Elber, who has, in her own words--
17:38 Speaker 04 This crazy obsession with Claire McCardell and her designs.
17:44 Avery Trufelman? Julie has an amazing collection of McCardell clothes.
17:48 Speaker 04 I've been on eBay a lot in the last 10 years. Let's just put it that way.
17:53 Avery Trufelman? Wow. So a monastic dress is like a tent dress, but there are straps or belts to tighten it around your waist, so you can fit it to your size.
18:00 Speaker 04 This is a beautiful dress that's probably from 1949, 1950, that is kind of a Grecian version of the monastic dress.
18:08 Avery Trufelman? So it's almost like a sack, like it doesn't have any zipper buttons or anything?
18:11 Speaker 04 Right, exactly.
18:12 Avery Trufelman? It's hard to imagine that a dress this simple was so revolutionary, but it really was.
18:18 Speaker 04 And then has these beautiful leather belts that she designed as well. And so it's really chic, classy. You could wear it out in New York tonight.
18:26 Avery Trufelman? Right. It was like, wow, something sexy and fun and easy didn't have to be tightly fitted.
18:33 Speaker 04 This is this lovely dress that is made for somebody who might be a little bloated some days, you know?
18:40 Avery Trufelman? The monastic dress took off.
18:42 Speaker 01 That dress was a smash success. It sold out.
18:46 Avery Trufelman? Georgia O'Keeffe was a big fan. Lauren Bacall was a big fan. Not of Claire yet, of the dress at this point. No one knew Claire McCardell was behind the design.
18:55 Speaker 01 No one knew she made it because her name wasn't on the label. Because at that time, designers did not have their names on the labels of clothes. It was either the department store or it was the manufacturer.
19:06 Avery Trufelman? It was just townly frocks behind this design, but they really hammed up how genius this dress was.
19:12 Speaker 03 It's the most talked of, most successful dress of the season.
19:15 Avery Trufelman? April Callahan in the Fashion Institute archives again.
19:18 Speaker 03 Everybody lost their mind. The monastic was a sensation because nobody had ever seen anything like it. Even Claire's boss, Howard Geis, said at the time, "No one had ever seen anything like Claire's designs."
19:30 Avery Trufelman? Although Claire was always very candid that she wasn't the first to make a belted sack dress ever, she spoke very openly about her inspiration in Women's Wear Daily in November 1940.
19:41 Speaker 03 It says, "Claire doesn't make any 'I was first with it' claims about fashion. Take the case of the monastic dress, for instance. There was an Algerian costume that so intrigued her that she made it up in a red woolen dress along the same loose lines, belting it with a black leather belt."
19:57 Avery Trufelman? So, yes, Claire was inspired by an Algerian dress. Originality can be a little fuzzy in fashion. However, that said, almost as soon as the monastic dress came out, it was immediately, exactly, directly ripped off. It's in the advertisement for the monastic dress.
20:14 Speaker 03 Success breeds imitation. Copies under various names have appeared all over the country, at prices ranging from the obviously cheap to the extravagantly expensive.
20:24 Avery Trufelman? Wait, this is wild that it was introduced five weeks ago and they're like so aware that it's everywhere.
20:29 Speaker 03 This is the phenomenon that this dress spurred.
20:32 Avery Trufelman? Which is so funny, right? This is a dress by a company that until this point was just ripping off French designers, but as soon as they had their own original design ripped off, they were like, "No."
20:42 Speaker 03 It was copied all over the market despite efforts to protect it.
20:45 Speaker 04 And then when she did the monastic dress, it got knocked off so much that her boss, Henry Geis, had a complete nervous breakdown.
20:51 Avery Trufelman? Historian and sewist Julie Elber again. Essentially, Geis wasn't prepared for such a huge hit for Townley frocks. He hadn't ordered enough fabric, he hadn't hired enough help. There was a huge backlog of orders for the monastic dress. And then, Townley couldn't compete with their own knockoffs. The competition outran them. The monastic dress should have launched Townley into the stratosphere, but instead, it hobbled them with legal fees. As McCardell wrote, "Geiss has made such a mess of everything."
21:23 Speaker 04 So she, ironically, having the most successful dress on 7th Avenue, she got fired.
21:30 Avery Trufelman? And then Claire just needed a job.
21:33 Speaker 04 She ended up working unhappily with Hattie Carnegie for a while.
21:36 Avery Trufelman? Hattie Carnegie was not actually related to steel magnate Andrew Carnegie. That's exactly what she'd want you to think. She was just a Jewish immigrant who changed her last name to something that sounded impressive. So I'm sort of obsessed with her. She's kind of iconic. But ultimately, Hattie Carnegie was more of a society lady who liked to fancy herself a designer.
21:53 Speaker 04 Hattie took all the credit, but she had this wonderful stable of designers.
21:57 Avery Trufelman? The two women did not go well together. Hattie Carnegie was overseeing a precision glamorous tailoring shop, and Claire McCardell was a modernist, deconstructing clothes to their simplest forms. It was not a fit. Like, for example, a Broadway actress who had come to Hattie Carnegie was apoplectic that Claire McCardell designed her a simple, pared-down dress. Hattie Carnegie's customers wanted sequins and beads and found Claire's things too plain for the money. Carnegie knew her customers wanted to be poured and stitched right into their clothes. So Hattie Carnegie was miffed when Claire won a contest in the 1939 World's Fair.
22:37 Speaker 04 Claire, in her letters, would get all excited because somebody from the Times wanted to talk to her, and then instead, Miss Carnegie stepped in and did the interview. So they were loggerheads quite a bit.
22:48 Avery Trufelman? But a weird benefit of working for society lady Hattie Carnegie was this.
22:53 Speaker 01 Claire was among just a handful of designers and editors who were the last to see Paris before it was taken over by the Nazis.
23:03 Avery Trufelman? I mean, it was kind of a dumb move. Like, they kind of went to Paris as World War II was breaking out.
23:08 Speaker 01 The war, the war was officially on in, in Europe. You know, it was that moment where everybody was waiting for what Hitler would do.
23:16 Avery Trufelman? Everyone was taking World War II very lightly. An attache at the French Embassy speculated, "The Germans will attack..." This spring and be stopped. Then the Hitler machine will collapse. And a number of society ladies and designers and editors from American fashion magazines were like, we have to go to Europe and support the couture this season anyway.
23:33 Speaker 01 And so Hattie is like, whoa, be damned, we're going. And Hattie was Jewish and her family's like, you're not going to Europe right now? This is insanity.
23:43 Avery Trufelman? Ugh, Hattie, you nut. I'm obsessed with you.
23:46 Speaker 01 And she reluctantly stayed behind and Claire went.
23:48 Avery Trufelman? Claire's parents were understandably also worried that their daughter was walking into World War II. Claire wrote, please don't worry about it. It's a wonderful opportunity and I can break my neck skiing, too. Way too cavalier. So la di da, Claire went to France and ended up spending 24 hours without water, food, or sleep. There were gas masks in the coatroom at Maxim's.
24:11 Speaker 01 And she wrote these just poignant letters home about what it was like to see Paris as this buildup to war was happening.
24:19 Avery Trufelman? She wrote, there are no bombs and no actual fighting at the front. But there is a sickness that is much worse than the war. It's the change, the end of something and not knowing what it will be after.
24:33 Speaker 01 A few months later, Paris went dark and it was, it was gone.
24:37 Avery Trufelman? The center of global fashion disappeared. Among all the many more immediate and dire concerns of war, all the New York fashion designers had no idea where they were going to get next season's designs.
24:54 Speaker 01 Where's the pipeline of ideas going to come?
24:57 Avery Trufelman? You can hear Claire's brain start to churn with new ideas.
25:01 Speaker 03 This is 1939.
25:02 Avery Trufelman? Can you read that top one?
25:03 Speaker 03 Yeah. Claire McCardell, dress designer for Hattie Carnegie, predicted a swing away from the voluptuously feminine figure towards a boyish slenderness.
25:12 Speaker 01 "Wartime always ushers in a feeling for uniforms and fashion," she said.
25:16 Avery Trufelman? As World War II would go on, Claire would design civil defense uniforms.
25:20 Speaker 01 She did design uniforms, yeah. She designed Red Cross uniforms at one point.
25:24 Avery Trufelman? There was no way Claire would stay working for the society lady Hattie Carnegie.
25:28 Speaker 04 She eventually left right around the time that the war was being waged in Paris and they couldn't go back to Paris anymore. And so then she was brought back into Townley.
25:39 Avery Trufelman? The new head of Townley Frocks cleverly lured Claire back.
25:42 Speaker 04 But Claire, considering that she had been fired a couple of times, when she came back, she put all of her cards on the table because she said, "I'm going to have my name on the label and I'm going to do my designs the way I want them to be done." And for somebody to be doing that on Seventh Avenue was really, really pretty ballsy on her part.
26:00 Avery Trufelman? At the age of 35, Claire McCardell was the first designer to get her name on a Seventh Avenue manufacturers label. And she was the first designer to be given full creative control.
26:10 Speaker 01 She got her name stitched on to the label in the 1940s.
26:14 Avery Trufelman? Labels proudly said, "Claire McCardell for Townley Frocks."
26:18 Speaker 01 And one of the things that Claire started doing at Townley was she was moving very far away from the haute couture idea. She wanted to harness mass production. She said,
26:31 Avery Trufelman? "We are a mass production country. We want to give the best to all people."
26:36 Speaker 01 "All of us deserve the right to good fashion."
26:39 Avery Trufelman? Claire made use of humble fabrics.
26:41 Speaker 04 Cotton, gingham, denim, that kind of thing.
26:44 Avery Trufelman? Not only because they were affordable.
26:46 Speaker 01 "Anybody could wear it and it could be mass produced."
26:49 Avery Trufelman? They were also sturdy.
26:50 Speaker 01 So she was thinking about how to make something that was both beautiful, but that could also be washable. It could be wrinkle free.
26:57 Avery Trufelman? And this was wild to make dresses out of denim.
27:01 Speaker 01 Like, there was Lady Levis in the 30s, but there was no denim in women's wear. It was a gendered fabric.
27:07 Avery Trufelman? And this resourcefulness became especially useful once the United States entered World War II in 1941 because the fabrics that Americans had access to became incredibly limited.
27:17 Speaker 01 The rationing was really strict. Very few fabrics were allowed to be used. Most were held for military use.
27:25 Avery Trufelman? General Limitation Order L-85 banned fabric-hungry fashions. No more pleats, no more French cuffs on pants.
27:32 Speaker 01 Skirts had to be shorter and tighter, and you couldn't have aprons.
27:37 Avery Trufelman? Belts couldn't be wider than 2 inches. Women's slacks couldn't have belts at all. The belted, fabric-heavy, monastic dress became a relic of the past.
27:47 Speaker 01 And this is where McCardell just thrived because she was really creative.
27:52 Avery Trufelman? A lot of designers were very annoyed by all these wartime constraints. But Claire McCardell loved them. She thought these limitations were fun challenges, and here's a perfect example.
28:03 Speaker 04 Shoes were rationed during World War II. And she figured out a way that you could get around it in that ballet shoes were not rationed. So she went to Capizio, the famous dance shoemaker, and said, "Would you make some that match my outfits?"
28:18 Avery Trufelman? Ta-da, the creation of the ballet flat.
28:21 Speaker 04 Borrowed from the ballet dancer for Live Young Americans by Claire McCardell for her Townley Frogs collection.
28:27 Avery Trufelman? And during the war, out of necessity, Claire created one of her most famous designs, a version of the wrap dress. She was essentially recruited into it by iconic fashion editor Diana Vreeland.
28:41 Speaker 04 Claire had been called into Diana Vreeland's office.
28:44 Speaker 01 Diana was very melodramatic. She's like, "Women are suffering, Claire. They're suffering."
28:49 Avery Trufelman? Middle and upper-class women were suffering because now they had to do their own housework.
28:54 Speaker 04 And Vreeland said, "We need something that socialites can wear, darling, when we're cleaning our houses because all of our domestic help have left and gone through the defense plan."
29:07 Avery Trufelman? The families that used to hire an immigrant girl to do all the cooking and cleaning now couldn't.
29:12 Speaker 04 Particularly at wartime, domestic help started going to the factories, and that generation had to learn how to cook.
29:18 Avery Trufelman? Claire herself had to learn how to cook for the first time. And she actually got really into it. She took cooking lessons. She got quite good.
29:24 Speaker 04 It was kind of a novelty. It was sort of like leading up to the whole Julia Child thing in the '60s when all of a sudden, cooking became this much bigger deal in the US.
29:35 Avery Trufelman? "But this is why women were suffering," quote-unquote, "because they needed clothes that they could both cook and entertain in."
29:41 Speaker 04 Here she is. She's gonna clean her house now. She never had to do it before.
29:47 Avery Trufelman? You can see this in Harper's Bazaar. There's a spread featuring a socialite wife of a polo player.
29:52 Speaker 04 She says, "I'm doing my own work. The ideal garment for it, for cooking, dusting, scrubbing, painting, pottering, or any odd job around the house. Designed by Claire McCardell, Lord and Taylor has it."
30:04 Avery Trufelman? That's where Claire came in with her brand-new dress.
30:07 Speaker 01 It's called the "popover" because you could pop it over your clothes.
30:11 Avery Trufelman? It was a little wraparound dress, cute, charming, which could easily slip on for getting a little messier.
30:17 Speaker 01 And this was one of the great wartime inventions that Claire made and that became wildly famous and sort of pioneered the wrap dress.
30:26 Avery Trufelman? Earlier versions even had an oven mitt attached.
30:29 Speaker 01 And the oven mitt is like attached with a...
30:31 Speaker 03 With a string to the actual dress.
30:33 Speaker 01 That is amazing.
30:34 Speaker 03 So you don't lose it.
30:34 Avery Trufelman? And as April reminded me, it's not just an oven mitt. That mitt could be used to prod logs in the fire. It's anything.
30:41 Speaker 03 It could be used in the kitchen. It could be used in the garden. It could be used doing chores. So it really was an all-purpose style.
30:48 Avery Trufelman? Eventually, though, the oven mitt went away.
30:50 Speaker 01 The "popover" just became a wrap dress that she kept in her collection for decades.
30:54 Speaker 03 Claire brought it back year after year after year after year in various different incarnations and in varying levels of formality.
31:01 Avery Trufelman? And the "popover" was affordable, especially compared to some of McCardell's designs she had made before the war.
31:06 Speaker 01 Her dresses were selling for $30, which in 1930 wasn't cheap.
31:11 Avery Trufelman? Oh, my god, that's $582 today.
31:13 Speaker 01 But then when the war came, her most popular style, the "popover," you could get for $3.95.
31:18 Avery Trufelman? That's like $78.
31:19 Speaker 04 And there's a lot of people in the world that can't afford to buy a McCardell because they weren't cheap.
31:24 Avery Trufelman? So, Julie Elber says, many, many people sewed their own "popovers." Claire McCardell encouraged this.
31:30 Speaker 04 She released sewing patterns through the Spadia Sewing Pattern Company in the early '50s through the mid-'50s. And she was a believer in getting her designs out to the masses.
31:42 Avery Trufelman? Because... Claire McCardell's designs were really supposed to help you live better. She always put her closures on the side or in the front. So women could dress themselves, which is like, duh. But back in Claire's time, a lot of dresses required someone else to zip you up or button you in. She said, "You may live alone and like it, but if you can't get your zipper up and you wrench out your arm, that's just terrible." Claire was a real advocate for independent living. She herself lived alone until she was 37, which is like, shockingly late in her time. She married very late. Marriage wasn't important to her. And when Claire did eventually marry, it wasn't a traditional marriage by any measure.
32:26 Speaker 04 Part of it was that she was really the breadwinner in the family. Her husband was kind of a ne'er-do-well. Really? Yeah.
32:34 Avery Trufelman? His first marriage had been to an heiress, so he had long since stopped working, even when he did not get a payout from his first wife's estate.
32:41 Speaker 04 When they got married, Claire became not just the breadwinner, but she was also stepmother to his kids while she's running this big business. But somehow they worked it out, and it was apparently a love match. Was he handsome? Extremely handsome, very, very socially adept.
32:59 Avery Trufelman? This was where Claire needed help. She was secretly painfully shy.
33:05 Speaker 04 He would take her out dancing at the rooftop of the St. Regis. And he knew a lot of people and really, she was this very introverted person. And so he gave her this really wonderful social life.
33:18 Avery Trufelman? Claire was living a completely modern life in the 1940s. She had these really strong convictions, and she macheted this new uncharted path with her comfortable, practical clothes that allowed women to be free. Cue the villainous music. Here comes Dior.
33:37 Speaker 01 Because they were getting cinched back in.
33:39 Avery Trufelman? Christian Dior made extraordinary clothes. I don't want to turn him into a cartoonish villain, but that guy really loved tiny, structured waists.
33:48 Speaker 01 He called it the wasp waist. He was like, how small could you get that waist?
33:53 Avery Trufelman? Claire McCardell was about fitting a woman's body, not making a woman fit her designs.
33:58 Speaker 01 And Claire got into a media spat with the French. She was angry. She said, why are we going backwards? What are we doing? Everything Claire fought for, to have a woman feel free and open in her body, we're going right back to this thing.
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37:45 Speaker 01 I think when you think about the 50s, that's what you picture is that Dior look.
37:49 Avery Trufelman? The hourglass form, that Dior shape that is the 1950s.
37:54 Speaker 01 That really tight waist, that poofed out skirt, that pretty dress.
37:59 Avery Trufelman? That look was the announcement that Paris was back, baby.
38:03 Speaker 01 So 1947, Paris is trying to get its footing again. They want to reclaim their status as the center of culture and fashion. And Christian Dior, one thing I did not realize is he was the same age as Claire. They were born a few months apart.
38:18 Avery Trufelman? Christian Dior was three months older than Claire McCardell.
38:20 Speaker 01 Dior was actually new to fashion, newer to fashion than she was.
38:24 Avery Trufelman? But you know, Claire was a girl.
38:25 Speaker 01 He had his first collection come out in 1947, and it was wildly anticipated because they needed something to save the haute couture tradition. And he wanted to, as he put it, save women from nature. He wanted to put them back on a pedestal. And in a lot of ways, what Dior wanted was to go back to his beloved mother's Victorian era, like very structured clothing.
38:51 Avery Trufelman? Women were now supposed to go back to being the shape of the number eight.
38:54 Speaker 01 And he unleashed the new look. It's said that Carmel Snow was the one who called it, oh, Christian, it's such a new look. There's mixed attribution of where that first came. And it was, people went wild for it because it felt like Paris is back.
39:08 Avery Trufelman? It was the ultimate declaration that war was over.
39:12 Speaker 01 He created these long skirts. And the thing is, is after the war, remember all the rationing in the tight short skirts? When McCardell was asked by a fashion editor, what do you think is coming? She said, oh, we're going to have really long, beautiful skirts. And she effectively did a new look design, which she was doing the long, full skirts again, but she wasn't putting anyone into this understructure.
39:34 Avery Trufelman? Yeah, there was a way to make this statement without the discomfort.
39:37 Speaker 01 One of his models in his new look corset fainted during preparation for the show. And he told it in this joke.
39:44 Avery Trufelman? Ha, ha, ha, she fainted.
39:46 Speaker 01 People were getting hurt. Another thing that irritated her so much about Dior is you had to like get help to get dressed because there are all these little tiny buttons up the back. She's like, oh, we're going back. We're going back to this time where a woman is supposed to be trussed up and put on display. And Claire didn't see it as a new look. She saw it as a regression.
40:05 Avery Trufelman? You can't go back. You have to design for the lives American women lead today. This is what Claire McCardell said in 1955 to a promising young journalist.
40:18 Speaker 01 She got branded the gal who defied Dior in this article, written by a young Betty Friedan. And Betty was noticing the way the door was closing shut on women again in the 50s, after the freedoms they were experiencing in the 30s and 40s.
40:33 Avery Trufelman? The feminine mystique would come out eight years later. But Claire McCardell didn't get to read it.
40:40 Speaker 01 Claire died very young. She died at 52. She had what we now understand to be a genetic predisposition to colon cancer. At the time, they did not understand that.
40:48 Avery Trufelman? Claire McCardell died on March 22, 1958, only shortly after Christian Dior died in October of the previous year. These two designers had been born months apart, and they died months apart. They both, in their similar lifespans, completely upended what women wore and what we consider fashion to be. Well, this leads to like the big question, which is, why is Dior so much more famous than Claire McCardell? Why wasn't Claire McCardell Dior?
41:20 Speaker 01 I think there's a lot of reasons for this. One is, her label wasn't carried forward.
41:26 Avery Trufelman? Claire didn't own her own label. She had worked her way up at Townley.
41:30 Speaker 01 She was working for a 7th Avenue manufacturer, and she ended up getting to become a partner in that company. But then, when she was gone, they didn't know what to do about it.
41:41 Avery Trufelman? I mean, there weren't any designers for ready-to-wear. There weren't names on mass production clothes. That was new. There was no protocol here.
41:50 Speaker 01 So Claire McCardell, when she died, Townley tried to keep her label alive, probably for about a year, year and a half. But what they quickly learned was that they, A, at the time, didn't have a lot of models for what it looked like to keep someone's name going in a ready-to-wear line in America and have another designer. But also, they just didn't know how to replace her. She was somewhat irreplaceable. And so they made the decision to let the line die.
42:15 Avery Trufelman? She pioneered the fashion designer as we understand it today.
42:19 Speaker 01 And so because she was first... It also meant that there was no pattern for what you did after a designer died. But I also think that what I realized in researching this book is we forgot all the names of the women of this era.
42:31 Avery Trufelman? Elizabeth Hawes, Zelda Winvaldez, Bonnie Cashin, Anne Lowe, many, many more.
42:36 Speaker 01 Unfortunately, they weren't prioritized in the storytelling.
42:39 Avery Trufelman? None of these American women could have been Dior. Dior was capable of owning his own business, which was high fashion. It was haute couture. It was considered high art.
42:51 Speaker 01 I think that Dior's name carried on because his label carried on.
42:55 Avery Trufelman? But can I tell you something? Dior's label almost didn't carry on. After Dior passed away, his company was barely limping through the 1960s, when hippie fashion had taken over and there were fewer customers clamoring for custom ball gowns. The brand survived by licensing out its name, slapping Dior on sunglasses and bags and ties and men's shirts. And by the early 80s, 90% of Dior's sales were licenses. They held 260 licenses worldwide for products made by other companies, usually made cheaply with shoddy construction that were not up to luxury standards. Dior lost all quality control.
43:38 Avery Trufelman? They developed a terrible reputation and their finances fell into horrible disarray. And so, Dior was bought out. And it lay in the bowels of a big holding company until 1984, when this holding company was bought by an elegant French real estate developer named Bernard Arnault, who immediately began to clean house and fired 8,000 workers and ditched anything in the holding company that wasn't Dior. He found Dior, this diamond in the rough, and he polished it and he used it as his anchor to create the biggest luxury empire in history,
44:18 Avery Trufelman? LVMH, the company that owns most designer brands and Sephora and all the duty-free stores. And it has made Bernard Arnault one of the top 10 richest men in the world. So that's another reason why we all know Dior's name. Nothing like that has happened with Claire McCardell. But it's not really about just superficially reviving her name or fixing the label back on address again.
44:46 Speaker 04 This was a movement that was always about more than clothes. It was really about autonomy and freedom and a capacity to choose how you wanted to live your life.
44:56 Avery Trufelman? And so, while it might not be a full-blown revival of the Claire McCardell brand, I think Julie Elber is doing exactly what Claire McCardell would have wanted.
45:06 Speaker 04 I got together with my friend Jenny Rushmore, who runs the Cashmereette Pattern Company.
45:12 Avery Trufelman? With the Cashmereette Pattern Company, you can buy the patterns as a PDF and print them out, so anyone from anywhere can order them.
45:18 Speaker 04 So people are making these all over the world now.
45:20 Avery Trufelman? And Julie has helped them make a version of a pattern of Claire McCardell's monastic dress.
45:27 Speaker 04 These are a couple of different versions of this dress that I made.
45:30 Avery Trufelman? From a size zero to size 32.
45:33 Speaker 04 And now people are making them as party dresses and wearing them all over.
45:36 Avery Trufelman? You could wear it to a wedding. You could wear it to the beach.
45:39 Speaker 04 Oh, I love this. Isn't it great? It's great. Doesn't it feel good, too? It's beautiful. Yeah.
45:46 Avery Trufelman? And this dress looks just as timeless, just as elegant, just as comfortable as it did when Claire McCardell first wore it to work, 88 years ago.
46:10 Avery Trufelman? Articles of Interest is made by me, Avery Trufelman, with music by Ray Royal, Sasami, and Lelitone. Mixed by Morgan Flannery, mastered by Pedro Rafael Rosado, both of the super-talented team over at PRX. Thanks for your help, guys. Elizabeth Evitz Dickinson's book, once again, is called Claire McCardell: The Designer Who Set Women Free. It's really amazing. April Callahan's podcast, if you don't already listen to it, I can't believe you don't already listen to it. It's called Dress. And Julie Elber is a sewing genius. If you want to print out a version of her monastic dress pattern and make it for yourself, I will have a link up at articlesofinterest.substack.com.
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