Claire McCardell
The Designer Who Set Women Free
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4.8 • 5 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Named one of The New York Times’s 100 Notable Books of 2025
The riveting hidden history of Claire McCardell, the most influential fashion designer you’ve never heard of.
Claire McCardell forever changed fashion—and most importantly, the lives of women. She shattered cultural norms around women’s clothes, and today much of what we wear traces back to her ingenious, rebellious mind. McCardell invented ballet flats and mix-and-match separates, and she introduced wrap dresses, hoodies, leggings, denim, and more into womenswear. She tossed out corsets in favor of a comfortably elegant look and insisted on pockets, even as male designers didn’t see a need for them. She made zippers easy to reach because a woman “may live alone and like it,” McCardell once wrote, “but you may regret it if you wrench your arm trying to zip a back zipper into place.”
After World War II, McCardell fought the severe, hyper-feminized silhouette championed by male designers, like Christian Dior. Dior claimed that he wanted to “save women from nature.” McCardell, by contrast, wanted to set women free. Claire McCardell became, as the young journalist Betty Friedan called her in 1955, “The Gal Who Defied Dior.”
Filled with personal drama and industry secrets, this story reveals how Claire McCardell built an empire at a time when women rarely made the upper echelons of business. At its core, hers is a story about our right to choose how we dress—and our right to choose how we live.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist Dickinson debuts with an admiring biography of American fashion designer Claire McCardell (1905–1958). After graduating from Parsons design school in New York City, McCardell apprenticed at male-owned Seventh Avenue design studios before eventually becoming the head designer at Townley Frocks, a mid-level sportswear manufacturer. An advocate for function over fashion—what "Paris unleashed every few months to keep a woman agitated and hungry and buying new clothes," Dickinson writes—she drew inspiration from everyday life to pioneer ballet flats; ready-to-wear separates; and the wrap dress. She also nearly single-handedly brought sportswear—previously restricted to "private, female-only spaces"—into public spaces. During WWII, when the New York fashion scene was cut off from French influences, McCardell seized the opportunity to design slacks for the influx of women entering factory jobs, and to provide demonstrations for women on how to repurpose fabrics that were in short supply. Throughout, Dickinson illustrates how fashion served as a mirror for sociopolitical change, with the suffragist ideals of the 19th century that influenced McCardell (the notion that "a women's freedom began with her clothes... Unencumbered bodies meant unencumbered lives") giving way to postwar conservatism as women returned to the home and Christian Dior put forth a hyperfeminized look that emphasized cinched waists and structured shoulders. Fashion aficionados won't want to miss this.
