Claire McCardell grew up in Frederick, Maryland, the daughter of a bank president. She studied at Parsons in New York and in Paris, and took a position in 1930 at the sportswear manufacturer Townley Frocks on Seventh Avenue. She stayed, substantively, for her entire career. Townley re-named its sportswear line Claire McCardell Clothes by Townley in 1941. She is the only major twentieth-century American designer whose name appeared on a department-store label during her lifetime.

The Premise

McCardell's argument was structural. American couture, to the extent it existed in the 1930s, was European couture copied. McCardell rejected this. American clothing, she argued, needed to be designed for America — for working women, for mass production, for washing machines, for wardrobes with no maids. Her collections were designed accordingly: wrap dresses, tie-waist trousers, jersey separates, denim (which she was the first luxury designer to treat as a serious fabric), deep pockets, flat ballet shoes.

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Most of my ideas come from trying to solve my own problems. — Claire McCardell

The Monastic and the Popover

The Monastic dress of 1938 — a bias-cut tent dress gathered at the waist with a belt, wearable in six or seven different ways — sold so well that Townley ran out of stock within a week of its advertisement in Harper's Bazaar. The Popover dress of 1942, a denim wrap dress with a matching oven mitt, designed at Diana Vreeland's request for "something a woman could wear while cooking," sold 75,000 units at $6.95 apiece in its first year and entered the permanent collection of the Costume Institute.

The Archive

McCardell died of colon cancer in New York in 1958, at 53, at the peak of her commercial success. Her archive is held jointly by the Maryland Center for History and Culture and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The 2022 biography Claire McCardell: The Designer Who Set Women Free by Nancy MacDonell has, since publication, reinstated her in the American-design conversation from which she had, through the late twentieth century, partially faded.