McCardell had several other successful designs which stayed in her collections, with slight changes, for years. Their lines are often harsh and masculine, … [and] when Chanel gave them soft feminine simplicity, it was Chanel they loved. Exhausted from production problems and from fighting counterfeits, Geiss shuttered his business, and McCardell was out of her job. Kirkland recalled how one “agitated dress manufacturer” on Seventh Avenue shouted at his staff, “There’s a girl up the street making a dress with no back, no front, no waistline, and my God, no bust darts!” Manufacturers and retailers began flooding stores with copies of McCardell’s dress. This site is no longer being updated so head over to Seamwork to get all the latest patterns, tutorials, video classes, and more. Dior said he wanted to “save women from nature,” and he reintroduced the corset. 5 out of 5 stars (534) 534 reviews $ 25.00. 9,831 of her sketches created during this time are now archived in the Fashion Design History Collection at the New School in New York. Most importantly, when hampered with too much luggage on a European trip, she created separates by designing dresses in parts with interchangeable tops and skirts. I love Clair McCardell's designs. The idea of separates, in coordinating colors and creating endless configurations was revolutionary, because of its practicality and economy. Claire Mccardell: 1942 Popover Dress, The Pattern Diagram. That spring, with the latest collection nearly complete, Turk took a trip over Memorial Day weekend and drowned in a boating accident. (Maryland Historical Society), Claire McCardell shown at work in an undated photograph. Her father was the bank president, her mother a self-professed Southern belle from Mississippi. When he died in an accident, McCardell was given the job of … She heavily utilized easy and accessible fasteners in her clothing, from zippers, to toggles, to rope. Claire McCardell is one of my favorite designers of the 20th century. For fall 1938, Claire shows dirndls (skirt with attached apron), which fall flat, and the Monastic dress—which takes off after Best & Co. buys the look and markets it as the Nada frock. “Her clothes are timeless. Love the idea of play clothes even though I’m getting ready for a workday. Klein wanted McCardell back as head designer, against Geiss’s objections. The buyer didn’t purchase much from Townley’s official fall collection — but he did buy that dress off McCardell’s back in an exclusive deal for the retailer. Wool ensemble, late 1940s. We’re sorry, comments for this post have been closed. After a few more months abroad, McCardell understood that “this clothes business certainly is a gamble. McCardell learned of a young woman from New York who was manufacturing shoes for American expats in Paris. After her death, McCardell’s family elected not to keep the label going. “Claire who?” American sportswear designer Claire McCardell’s name may not resonate with influencers but they may recognize her impact. “To stand by this window for a few minutes is to get a liberal education in customer reaction to this silhouette,” the article stated. By the late 1940s, designers, many of them men, endeavored to once again lace women into body-punishing, structured clothing, in what amounted to a backlash against the woman-centric look that McCardell had helped pioneer. lol. McCardell’s innovations included the monastic dress, a free-flowing garment resembling a monk’s cassock that when belted at the waist fit any figure. Thanks for reading the Colette blog! What a great post, Im inspired to research more about this lady :) That draped bathing suit is so cool! http://kerrytaylorauctions.com/one-item/?id=122&auctionid=401, Lot no 122 – auction Date – 24th June 2014. Clair McCardell 1940's Cloister Dress Folkwear Pattern This was intended to be a pack-able wedding dress for a bride during WWII. The press raved that it “created more comment and discussion than any dress in years,” causing it to become a best-selling design of 1938. With America’s entry into the war, meanwhile, came regulations on the use of fashion materials. I would totally dig a “What Shall I Wear?” reissue. The concept of separates, now a foundation of American fashion, was ahead of its time. She was the cover subject of an article on the emergence of American fashion in the May 2, 1955 issue of Time magazine. From shop EvaDress. That day, McCardell was clad in a dress that she had sewn: a red wool shift with no padded shoulders or darts, and no sewn-in waist to structure the body into the idealized hourglass silhouette. They sneaked by the nurses’ station and went to the Pierre hotel, where Townley was holding a media preview of McCardell’s new line. Her mother always spoke of her daughter when I visited and showed me the TIME magazine…..Jayne Rose Ross. Mainstream fashion followed the pattern. In the hundreds of articles written about McCardell over her career, she was often depicted as a shy and restrained small-town girl who had miraculously made it in the big city. (Maryland Historical Society), From left: A plaid dress made and worn by McCardell, circa 1945; an evening gown made and worn by McCardell, circa 1940s; a McCardell dress made of fabric designed by Marc Chagall, circa 1955. McCardell’s Monastic would become a significant development in a battle that continues to this day — over how women should dress and over who gets the right to dress them. Henry Geiss was taken off guard by the dress’s remarkable success, and his workroom struggled to keep pace with demand. But when McCardell graduated in 1928, she entered an industry that was still far from friendly to ambitious, creative women. Best & Co. exclusively sold the dress for $29.95 and it sold out in a day. McCardell, Women’s Wear Daily later noted, had “ferretted out in Paris a French peasant’s navy, woolen hooded cape that swept around her ankles” and now she had “brought it home to wear over her ski clothes.” The article marveled at how McCardell “leaps a year or so ahead of the design trend and never hesitates to wear the most extreme costumes she has turned out.”. 3 comments: Unknown said... Just an FYI for you and your readers: the Folkwear patterns produced with the Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute have been permanently discontinued, as the Museum declined to renew the licensing agreement. And yet, fashion is nothing if not reactive. “With yards and yards of rough, exquisitely colored fabrics and an untarnished belief in the beauty of a woman’s figure, Miss McCardell has created gowns to make Seventh Avenue sit up,” the New York Times raved in an article that fall. An article from 1942 featured one male designer bemoaning the cuts as “very drastic” and impossible to live up to. By the early 1940s, World War II had effectively shut down the Paris fashion industry. Claire McCardell was a well known fashion designer who revolutionized women’s fashion in America. McCardell agreed to return with a few conditions. She found them fussy and refused to use them; Geiss ordered them sewn into the clothes anyway. Born in May 1905, McCardell grew up in the cloistered town of Frederick, Md. The person who can remember the models and sketch them for wholesale houses in the United States can make a fortune.” The American buyers, McCardell wrote, “try to get as many sketches as possible” without paying the Parisian houses for the designs. Fandom Apps Take your favorite fandoms with you and never miss a beat. Thank you for the excellent post. Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson is a writer in Baltimore. McCardell was inspired by Vionnet and Chanel when studying in Paris in 1926. Others sent sketchers to the Paris shows to surreptitiously draw the styles for replication. McCardell prefigured today’s multifaceted designer-led brands when she expanded her line to include bathing suits and jewelry and sunglasses and wedding dresses and children’s attire. McCardell topped the popularity of the Monastic with designs like her Popover, a wrap-front dress with a built-in matching potholder that retailed for under $7. This time, instead of running from their designer’s novel ideas, Townley frankly acknowledged them. Through radiation treatment, and a pain so severe it felt “as though my stomach will fall on the floor at times,” as she wrote her parents, McCardell continued to work. Talk:Claire McCardell Jump to ... specifically a paragraph on McCardell's relationship to modernism and why her Monastic dress carried such meaning for American women and style. Most significantly, at a time when fashion was Paris, this dress wasn’t a French knockoff. A little-known designer named Claire McCardell was at work in the Seventh Avenue headquarters of Townley Frocks, a clothing manufacturer. Parisian designers like Coco Chanel had freed women of the corset, but the boxy flapper dresses of the 1920s still hid a woman’s figure. “But even into the 1940s and ’50s,” she notes, “society was very resistant to what was radical and marvelous about McCardell.” Her brilliance was in her deep understanding of how a body truly moves: “McCardell wanted women to feel and to look better.”, Over the decades, McCardell’s life and clothes have seen numerous revivals and retrospectives at museums, including at the Fashion Institute of Technology and the Maryland Historical Society. © 2008–2020 Colette Media, LLC  •  Terms of Use  •  Privacy Policy. They sailed to Paris in 1926 for a year abroad with Parsons, and they entered the city at the height of the Jazz Age. The bodice is cut on the bias, a technique McCardell learned by deconstructing Vionnet dresses while she was a student in 1920’s Paris. Listen to this and other great stories from The Washington Post Magazine, A model in a short-sleeved variant of the Monastic dress by McCardell, circa 1938. “Geiss has made such a mess of everything at Townley,” McCardell wrote home. McCardell dress made from corded cotton, early 1950s. The first successful silhouette McCardell designed was the Monastic, a dartless, waistless, bias-cut, tent-style dress that could be worn with or without a belt. Earlier this year, her designs were featured in the ''American Ingenuity'' show at the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. “It wasn’t me in the clothes, or just wearing them, that interested me,” McCardell said, “it was the clothes in relation to me — how changed I felt once in them.” McCardell’s creations contained an alchemy that so many of us still seek: the ability to command the narrative of our own bodies, and to be seen not as mere eye candy but as a person to be reckoned with. Dior’s fashion brand didn’t appoint a woman as creative director until 2016. “I hated this,” she later wrote for a speech, “and often came back with collections of my own ideas, which I presented to my boss as rare finds from Bergdorf Goodman.” Joyce fired her after eight months, with the parting shot that she’d never understand design. Women spend three times the amount of money on clothes as men, yet they helm only 14 percent of the top womenswear brands. “She sometimes collapsed at work.”. I love the fact that she was inspired by her own, practical needs to design–her use of “everyday” type fabrics and cuts and silhouettes that were feminine but practical is still relevant today. It was August 1938. “Clairvoyant Claire had the subconscious desires of American women cased to perfection,” Sports Illustrated wrote in 1956 upon giving McCardell its American Sportswear Design Award. But the F.I.T. After viewing the Paris shows, Diana Vreeland, the famed editor of Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, wrote to McCardell: “It is the most curious thing as I look at the French dresses in 1956. The industry, however, took to calling it the “Monastic” because it was, according to publicity material at the time, “as simple as a monk’s cassock.”, Best took out full-page ads in New York papers. She marveled at the bustling Garment District, centered along Seventh Avenue, with its crush of salesmen and workers speaking English, Italian, Yiddish and Russian, and with carts of clothes rattling down the sidewalks. If my memory serves me correctly, Claire McCardell was an American designer that revolutionized daily dressing, mostly through her use of knits and her swimwear. (Courtesy of Fashion Institute of Technology/SUNY, FIT Library Special Collections and College Archive), McCardell in an undated photograph. Visualizza altre idee su Stile, Donna, Elegante. Claire McCardell took on the fashion industry — and revolutionized what women wear, Claire McCardell's experiences in the fashion industry were often frustrating before her big success came. Friedan was already thinking about “the problem that has no name,” which would culminate in her 1963 feminist cri de coeur “The Feminine Mystique.” In 1955, she published a profile on McCardell under the headline “The Gal Who Defied Dior.” Elizabeth Harris, McCardell’s stepdaughter, later told Nolf and Yohannan: “Claire was a feminist long before we had a name for them.”, In 1957, at what many believed to be the height of her career, she was diagnosed with colon cancer. From shop playclothesvintage. “He would have been happy if she gave that up,” he said, but “she was intent on having her career. “Good fashion somehow earns the right to survive,” McCardell believed, and her ideas live on, even if detached from her name. When it comes to an American classic, this popover clothe past times Claire McCardell is i of the most popular. Orrick arrived at the hospital on a cold January day and helped McCardell into a red wool suit. D&D Beyond New York City. Henry Geiss, with little option, turned to McCardell. As one news report later described it, McCardell was hurrying across the … Claire McCardell Dress Pattern - McCall's 4228; c.1957. McCardell was “a giant of American culture and of fashion,” says Paola Antonelli, senior curator of the department of architecture and design at MoMA, but “something happened that made us forget her, and I cannot really understand what it was.”, It may be that, as with her Monastic dress, the elegantly pragmatic genius of her work seeped into the culture at large. “I’ll never be a good designer,” she confided to a friend. ... By designing her famous Monastic dress, she allowed women to be comfortable and chic. Hi,I am finding this beautiful pattern by Claire McCardell a bit late in the game (Jan.07), but what led me here is a Butterick pattern for sale, style # 4919, that seemed soooo familiar that I did a search for Claire McCardell dresses, and your pattern here came up. “We decided to let the name die with her,” her brother Adrian McCardell told the Baltimore Sun in 1998. “It wasn’t that difficult. They were considered subtly sexy with functional decorations. I love the belt…and the fact that Claire really made wearing flats, mules trendy. Thanks! She envied the ease and pragmatism of men’s clothing, so she cut wrinkle-free wool on the bias, a technique that gives woven textiles a more flowing fit, and she sewed pockets into her dresses because “men are free from the clothes problem — why should I not follow their example?”. “She was just a girl,” Bessie Sustersic, who would remain McCardell’s assistant throughout her career, told Sally Kirkland. Time will later report, “Until then, American women had little choice of styles between a cotton house dress and an afternoon dress. “Things looked very black,” McCardell later said in a speech about Turk’s death, but the men and women in the Townley workroom rallied to her side, and McCardell, grief-stricken, finished the season. She rarely wore high heels, preferring flats, and she wore little makeup, save a swipe of silvery eye shadow above her hazel eyes. Flush with her success, McCardell asked Geiss to put her name on the Townley label. It was August 1938. Claire McCardell wears one of her creations that revolutionized the way women dress. 1957 Claire McCardell Dress EvaDress Pattern EvaDress. To try to understand the reasons behind this, CFDA and Glamour magazine conducted a survey within the industry this year called “The Glass Runway.” One hundred percent of the women interviewed believed gender inequity to be rampant in fashion. 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