After reading Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson’s engaging and well-styled biography of fashion designer Claire McCardell, I became a proselytizer.
“Who?” Friends would say when I said her name.
“The woman who put pockets in our clothes,” I’d say back. Their faces would ease into relaxation at the thought, the true gift she gave us, recognizing that yes, we have things to carry, and no, we don’t always want to bring a purse. But it wouldn’t be too much longer until frustration replaced their gratitude.
“Why have I never heard of her?”
Why, indeed. Claire McCardell was a powerhouse of a designer, pushing her ideas forward in the distinctly male world of fashion from the 1920s through her death, far too early, in 1958. At a time when women were expected to change into different dresses for different moments in the same day (Heaven forbid that you wear your tea dress to dinner!), McCardell introduced separates, the now obvious idea of wearing the same pants you wore for work, dressed up with a jacket to go out for drinks. While men were dressing women to please men (ugh, wait until you read about Christian Dior, who seemed like a real piece of work), McCardell was dressing women like she wanted to dress. When McCardell was growing up, women wore heavy wool dresses and tights — tights! — to swim. McCardell’s bathing suits put an end to that, the body-hugging two-piece suits she designed much more like those we wear today, designed for swimming, not modestly watching men swim.
Claire McCardell: The Designer Who Set Women Free sews together McCardell’s life, from her supportive, idyllic girlhood in Frederick, Maryland, to the rocky years of WWII, to her enigmatic marriage to a troubled man, and finally, to her tragic death of cancer when she ought to have been at her peak. The biography reads like a novel, thanks to McCardell’s habit of letter-writing and the extensive interviews Evitts Dickinson did with people who knew her.
If it weren’t for Evitts Dickinson’s biography, I may have gone my whole life not knowing who to thank for giving me pockets.
Simon & Schuster (2025)