McCARDELL, Claire

American designer

Born: Frederick, Maryland, 24 May 1905. Education: Attended Hood College, Maryland, 1923-25, and Parsons School of Design, New York and Paris, 1926-29. Family: Married Irving D. Harris, 1943. Career: Fashion model, knitwear designer, Robert Turk, Inc., New York, 1929-31; designer, Townley Frocks, New York, 1931-38; designer, Hattie Carnegie, New York, 1938-40; designer, Claire McCardell for Townley Frocks, New York, 1940-58; children's line, Baby McCardells, introduced, 1956. Exhibitions: Retrospective, Frank Perls Gallery, Beverly Hills, California, 1953; Innovative Contemporary Fashion: Adri and McCardell, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., 1971; Three Women: Madeleine Vionnet, Claire McCardell and Rei Kawakubo, Fashion Institute of Technology, New York, 1987. Awards: Mademoiselle Merit award, 1943; Coty American Fashion Critics award, 1944, 1958; Neiman Marcus award, 1948; Women's National Press Club award, 1950; Parsons medal for Distinguished Achievement, 1956. Died: 22 March 1958, in New York.

Publications

By McCARDELL:

Books

What Shall I Wear? The What, Where, When, and How Much of Fashion, New York, 1956.

On McCARDELL:

Books

Williams, Beryl, Fashion is Our Business, Philadelphia, 1945.

Lee, Sarah Tomerlin, editor, American Fashion: The Life and Lines of Adrian, Mainbocher, McCardell, Norell, Trigére, New York, 1975.

Milbank, Caroline Rennolds, Couture: The Great Designers, NewYork, 1985.

New York and Hollywood Fashion: Costume Designs from the Brooklyn Museum Collection, New York, 1986.

Koda, Harold, Richard Martin and Laura Sinderbrand, Three Women: Madeleine Vionnet, Claire McCardell, and Rei Kawakubo (exhibition catalogue), New York, 1987.

Milbank, Caroline Rennolds, New York Fashion: The Evolution of American Style, New York, 1989.

Steele, Valerie, Women of Fashion: Twentieth Century Designers, New York, 1991.

Stegemeyer, Anne, Who's Who in Fashion, Third Edition, New York,1996.

Articles

"Claire McCardell," in Current Biography (New York), November 1954.

"Designers Who Are Making News," in American Fabrics and Fashions (New York), No. 38, 1956.

"Claire McCardell" obituary, in the New York Times, 23 March 1958.

Morris, Bernadine, "Looking Back at McCardell: It's a Lot Like Looking at Today," in the New York Times, 24 May 1972.

Beckett, Kathleen, "Designing Women," in Vogue (New York),March 1987.

Weinstein, Jeff, "Vionnet, McCardell, Kawakubo: Why There AreThree Great Women Artists," in Village Voice (New York), 31 March 1987.

Drier, Deborah, "Designing Women," in Art in America (New York),May 1987.

Yusuf, Nilgin, "Form and Function," in Elle, June 1990.

"Claire McCardell: Designer of Fashion for All-American Beauties(The 100 Most Important Americans of the 20th Century)," Life, Fall 1990.

Als, Hilton, "Suited for Leisure," in Artforum (New York), 4 November 1994.

Claire McCardell was the founder of American ready-to-wear fashion, and in doing so defined what has become known as the American Look. She created casual but sophisticated clothes with a functional design, which reflected the lifestyles of American women. McCardell's design philosophy was that clothes should be practical, comfortable, and feminine. Capitalizing on the World War II restrictions on the availability of French fashions and fabrics, McCardell designed simple, inexpensive clothes under the label Townley Frocks by Claire McCardell and later Claire McCardell Clothes by Townley.

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. McCardell had several other successful designs which stayed in her collections, with slight changes, for years. In 1942 McCardell introduced the Popover, a wrap around, unstructured, utilitarian denim dress to be worn over smarter clothes. This garment was made in response to a clothing request by Harper's Bazaar for women whose hired help had left for wartime factory work. The Popover evolved in later collections into dresses, coats, beach wraps, and hostess dresses.

McCardell was known for many other innovations and she experimented with unconventional fabrics for various silhouettes. Her wool jersey bathing suits and cotton-diaper swimsuit are examples of nontraditional fabric use. Madras cotton halter-style full-length hostess gowns were shown for evening. Her design trademarks were double top-stitching, brass hardware replacing buttons with decorative hooks, spaghetti ties, large patch pockets, and Empire waists. McCardell also brought denim to the fashion forefront as a dress fabric, as well as mattress ticking, calicos, and wool fleece. Manmade fibers, too, were a source of innovation. She also loved leotards, hoods, pedal pushers, and dirndl skirts. Surprising color combinations were indicative of McCardell's work.

Ever resourceful, McCardell viewed the 1940s wartime restrictions as challenging. Shoes were heavily rationed, so McCardell promoted the ballet slipper as street wear, often covered in coordinating or matching fabrics to her clothing ensembles.

The inspirations for McCardell's designs were many. She relied primarily on her own intuition as a woman, believing that many other women had the same needs for their wardrobes. "Most of my ideas," stated McCardell, "come from trying to solve my own problems." She sought to find solutions by analyzing the various needs of women, concluding that essentially clothes must be functional. While skiing she found her head became quite cold and thus designed winter playclothes with hoods. She also recognized how cars and airplanes had changed the American travel lifestyle dramatically; women needed clothes that would travel well. Accordingly, McCardell designed a six-piece interchangeable and coordinated wardrobe of separates, enabling traveling woman to produce many combinations from just a few garments.

McCardell rarely looked to contemporary French fashion for inspiration, as many other American designers did before and after World War II. She recognized the differing needs of American women from the European couture client and the potential of the larger ready-to-wear market in the United States. In this way she was able to define the American style of casual elegance. Back in 1926 during her sophomore year at Parsons School of Design, McCardell studied in Paris. While there she was able to buy samples from the French couturier Madeleine Vionnet and study the pattern and cut of her garments. Vionnet's influence was evident in McCardell's work; though McCardell did not work in the couture tradition, she was able to create ready-to-wear clothing by simplifying Vionnet's cut. She incorporated the bias cut into her designs, both for aesthetic as well as functional effects. From Vionnet, McCardell said she learned "the way clothes worked, the way they felt."

The beauty of McCardell's clothes lay in the cut which then produced a clean, functional garment. Her clothes accentuated the female form without artificial understructures and padding. Rather than use shoulder pads, McCardell used the cut of the sleeve to enhance the shoulder. Relying on the bias cut, she created fitted bodices and swimsuits which flattered the wearer. Full circle skirts, neatly belted or sashed at the waist without crinolines underneath, a mandatory accessory for the New Look, created the illusion of the wasp waist. McCardell clothes often had adjustable components, such as drawstring necklines and waists, to accommodate many different body types.

Claire McCardell's greatest contribution to fashion history was in creating and defining the American Look. Her inspiration is evident in the work of the many fashion designers who followed her.

—Margo Seaman

MCCARDELL, CLAIRE

Claire McCardell was one of the most influential women's sportswear designers of the twentieth century. Best known for her contributions to the "American look," she was inspired by the active lifestyle of American women. Known for casual sportswear, shirtwaist dresses, and wool jersey sheaths, as well as practical leisure clothing and swimwear, which she liked to refer to as "playclothes," McCardell designed for working women who wanted stylish, well-made clothing in washable fabrics that were easily cared for.

McCardell was born in Frederick, Maryland, in 1905, where she attended Hood College for two years in the mid-1920s before earning a degree in fashion design at the Parsons School of Design in New York City in 1928. In the course of her studies she spent one year in Paris. Working after graduation as a fit model for B. Altman and Company, McCardell later obtained a job as a salesperson and design assistant with Emmet Joyce, an exclusive, made-to-order salon on Fifth Avenue. Within a matter of months, she was lured away by the knitwear manufacturer Sol Pollack to design and oversee his Seventh Avenue cutting room, where she stayed for less than a year. By late 1929 McCardell was working as a design assistant to Robert Turk, an independent designer and dressmaker, who later took her along with him when he was employed as chief designer at Townley Frocks in the early 1930s.

Turk died unexpectedly in a boating accident in 1932, and McCardell was promoted to chief designer at Townley. McCardell remained with Townley throughout her career, with the exception of a brief hiatus in the early 1940s, and eventually became a partner. During the time that Townley's partners restructured their business, McCardell worked at Hattie Carnegie; however, Townley soon rehired her as their head designer.

Innovation

While most of McCardell's contemporaries followed the long-standing tradition of copying Paris fashion, McCardell looked instead to the lives of American women for her inspiration. Insisting that "clothes should be useful," McCardell became one of the first designers to successfully translate high-styled, reasonably priced, impeccably cut clothing into the mass-production arena. Proudly American and rebelliously innovative, McCardell (who, as a student in Paris, had admired the work of Vionnet, Chanel, and Madame Grès) turned her back on the expensive, handmade confections of the haute couture and instead promoted American mass production, readily available materials, and the form-follows-function approach to design. Insisting that heavily decorated, padded, and corseted French fashions often sacrificed comfort to style, McCardell designed clean-lined, comfortable clothes that proved such a sacrifice was not only unacceptable; it was also unnecessary.

The retail magnate Stanley Marcus once described McCardell as "the master of the line, never a slave to the sequins … one of the few truly creative designers this country has ever produced." Shunning shoulder pads, back zippers, boning, and heavily constructed looks, McCardell became known for her self-tailoring, wrap-and-tie styles, backless halters, hook-and-eye closures, coordinated separates, racy bathing suits, and boldly printed, cotton plaid, shirtwaist dresses cut from men's shirting fabrics. Often referred to as "America's most American designer," McCardell's fresh, youthful designs were founded on logic, informed by comfort, and replete with a common sense, entirely undecorated look. As the veteran fashion model Suzy Parker once described them, McCardell's designs were "refreshingly 'unFrench.'" McCardell's first commercial hit came in 1938 with the "Monastic" dress, an

unfitted, waistless shift, cut on the bias, that hung straight from the waist and was belted in any way the wearer chose. The Monastic was so resoundingly popular that it was copied by competitors into the next decade and remained in her own line in updated versions for almost twenty years. Another McCardell success story was "capsule dressing," or four- and five-piece, mix-and-match separates groups in supple wool jersey, cotton, denim, and even taffeta. These stylish, well-edited groupings offered women a convenient travel wardrobe that sold altogether for about one hundred dollars and could be tucked into a handbag. An avid champion of pants and wool jersey for both day and evening wear, McCardell's forward-looking designs and fabric sensibility provided American women with multiseasonal clothing that was easily cared for, comfortable, and stylish, but never conspicuously chic.

The "American Look"

McCardell's pared-down, casual American style was the hallmark of what came to be hailed as the "American look," the name under which the work of McCardell and several of her like-minded contemporaries, such as Tina Leser and Tom Brigance, was marketed at Lord and Taylor during the late 1930s and early 1940s. During World War II, McCardell's designs earned further credibility, as they reflected an acute awareness of the evolving roles of mid-century American women. Offering sportswear and daywear that were at once appropriate for the office, cocktail hour, and leisure, McCardell eliminated the fuss, decoration, and strict categorization so often encountered in women's apparel of the time. Answering practical needs, McCardell's 1942 blue denim "Popover" dress, which sold for only $6.95, was made specifically for at-home domestic work or gardening and even included an attached oven mitt. True to her problem-solving approach to fashion design, McCardell used humble fabrics such as cotton calico, denim, jersey, and even synthetics, effectively ennobling everyday materials by way of thoughtful design and deftly executed construction. And while restrained and disciplined, McCardell's work was hardly devoid of details: Her signature, even idiosyncratic, "McCardellisms" included severe, asymmetrical, wrap necklines, yards-long sashes, spaghetti-string ties, double-needle top stitching, metal hook-and-eye closures, and even studded leather cuffs. With their sleek lines and "no-price look," McCardell's clothes became a mainstay in the wardrobe of college girls, working women, and housewives alike.

Claire McCardell achieved international fame during her lifetime, appearing on the cover of Time magazine and authoring a book on her fashion philosophy, What Shall I Wear? in 1957. In 1943 she married the architect Irving Drought Harris. McCardell was diagnosed with cancer in 1958, at the height of her success. The disease claimed her life that same year.

Looking at her own life as a starting point for her line, McCardell's casually elegant, pared-down minimalism and lifestyle-driven sportswear of the late 1930s and 1940s helped forge and define what came to be known as the "American look" and heralded the beginning of a new appreciation for American fashion. As fashion historian Valerie Steele points out in Women of Fashion, "without McCardell it is simply impossible to imagine a Donna Karan, Calvin Klein or a Marc Jacobs."

See alsoCasual Business Dress; Ready-to-Wear; Sportswear .

bibliography

Kirkland, Sally. "Claire McCardell." In American Fashion: The Life and Lines of Adrian, Mainbocher, McCardell, Norell, Trigère. Edited by Sarah Tomerlin Lee for the Fashion Institute of Technology. New York: Quadrangle/New York Times Books, 1975.

McCardell, Claire. What Shall I Wear? New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956.

Milbank, Caroline Rennolds. New York Fashion: The Evolution of American Style. New York: Abrams, 1989.

Steele, Valerie. Women of Fashion: Twentieth Century Designers. New York: Rizzoli International, 1991.

Yohannan, Kohle, and Nancy Nolf. Claire McCardell: Redefining Modernism. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1998.

Kohle Yohannan