Claire McCardell

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Claire McCardell (born May 24, 1905 in Frederick , Maryland , † March 22, 1958 in New York City ) was an American fashion designer of ready-to-wear fashion . She is considered to be the inventor of the practical, functional sportswear , which after the Second World War found its way into Europe under the term “American Look”.

Life

McCardell was the eldest of four children of Eleanor, née Clingan, and Adrian LeRoy McCardell. Her father was a member of the Maryland Senate and President of Frederick County National Bank.

When McCardell was 16, he wanted to move to New York and study fashion design there. Instead, her father convinced her to enroll at Hood's home economics college . Two years later, in 1925, she finally moved to New York and enrolled at the New York School of Fine and Applied Art . McCardell spent part of her studies at the Parsons School in Paris , then the center of fashion . At flea markets, she bought clothes from well-known fashion designers such as Madeleine Vionnet , which she separated and then sewn back together at home to better understand the pattern .

In 1923 McCardell graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in costume design. She then took on various odd jobs, first as a flower painter for paper lampshades and a try-on model for the B. Altman & Co. department store , then as an assistant in Emmet Joyce's fashion salon and in the knitwear manufacturer Sol Pollack . During this time she met the sportswear designer Robert Turk .

1930s

In 1929 McCardell began working as an assistant to Robert Turk. Two years later they both moved to the Townley Frocks fashion company. When Turk was killed in a boat accident a little later, McCardell completed his fall collection. McCardell later recalled: “I did what everyone else did then - I copied Paris. The collection wasn't great, but it sold. ”In the same year Dorothy Shaver , managing director of the influential department store chain Lord & Taylor , began designing McCardell as well as others. Tina Readers and Tom Brigance to market under the label "American Look".

As a 27-year-old chief designer, McCardell soon returned to Paris regularly, as was customary in the American fashion scene. Despite her admiration for Parisian haute couture , the cuts and materials seemed unsuitable for her customers' everyday clothing, so McCardell looked for alternative inspiration in museums, at flea markets and in street fashion. During the 1930s, against the opposition of Townley Frocks, McCardell began incorporating details into her designs that became part of her style, including sash belts , spaghetti straps, and workwear details such as: B. Rivets and denim seams. She herself coined the term "McCardellisms" for it. McCardell experimented with the loose cuts and comfortable materials used for sportswear, such as swimwear or clothing for skiing and tennis . This also included her maxim to equip each of her pieces of clothing with trouser pockets , because they offer a woman - in addition to storage space - a "place for her hands so as not to feel uncomfortable or vulnerable."

In 1938 she published the "Monastic" dress (for example: "Monastic Dress"), a wool dress with a diagonal cut with sewn-in pockets. It had no hem and hung loosely, but with the accompanying belt , its silhouette could be adapted in many ways to the body shape of the wearer, without the restrictive girdle that was common at the time . The 100-piece dress, available exclusively from Best & Co. in New York for $ 29.95, sold out within a day. The Monastic was widely copied and in an attempt to meet demand and prevent piracy, Townley Frocks became insolvent.

After Townley Frocks closed, McCardell was hired by Hattie Carnegie for their well-known clothing company, but McCardell's designs had little success with Carnegie's customers looking for more extravagant cuts. It was around this time that McCardell met fashion editor Diana Vreeland (then at Harper's Bazaar ), with whom she later became a lifelong friend. Shortly after McCardell left Carnegie, she attended her last Paris fashion show in 1940 and then finally refused to copy the French designs.

1940s

Townley Frocks reopened in 1940 under new management and again with McCardell as chief designer. With the label "Claire McCardell Clothes by Townley" sewn into the clothes, she became one of the first American designers whose name became a brand.

World War II cut the American fashion world off from Europe as a source of inspiration and material. McCardell knew how to benefit from this new artistic freedom and the war-related scarcity of materials. When leather was banned on all clothing except ballet shoes , McCardell cooperated with the dance shoe manufacturer Capezio and thereby made ballerinas the standard of women's shoe fashion. When the government announced a surplus of cotton material for weather balloons in 1944, McCardell bought the inventory and used it to design clothing. Easily available textiles such as denim , calico and wool jersey , with which she had already worked but which the fashion world dismissed as too simple, she now successfully used for women's clothing.

In 1941 McCardell first produced an ensemble line with which one could put together nine outfits from five pieces of clothing. She laid the foundation for this idea in 1934 when she designed five matching, combinable items of clothing for her trip to Paris. McCardell's pieces included skirts , trousers , bodysuits , tops, jackets and tops made from materials such as taffeta , jersey, cotton or wool . In doing so, she laid the foundation for an essential characteristic of the American look; it became known worldwide in 1985 with Donna Karan's "Seven Easy Pieces". In the same year McCardell first introduced the "Kitchen Dinner" dress (about "Kitchen-and-Dinner Dress"). The cotton dress had a long skirt with an apron made of the same fabric that could be discreetly taken off after cooking. In general, she introduced cotton, previously used solely for house dresses and golf wear, into fashion in the form of coats and evening dresses . She began to add swimsuits , jewelry , sunglasses , wedding dresses and children's clothing ("Baby McCardells") to her collections , thus anticipating an important aspect of today's ready-to-wear fashion. Her designs were worn by Lauren Bacall , Bettie Page and Georgia O'Keeffe .

In 1942 McCardell designed the "popover" dress (for example, "overcoat dress "), the forerunner of the wrap dress . The dress was made of gray cotton denim with a spacious pocket and matching cooking glove. McCardell developed it in response to a competition from Harper's Bazaar; What was needed was something fashionable that could be worn to house cleaning as well as to the cocktail party that followed. The popover dress hit stores for just $ 6.95 and sold more than 75,000 times in its first season alone. Over time, these dresses became the centerpiece of her collections and she designed versions in different lengths and materials.

In 1943 McCardell married the architect Irving Drought Harris, who had two children from their first marriage. They lived in New York and Bucks Counties , Pennsylvania. From 1944 McCardell taught at the Parsons School.

1950s

With McCardell's fame, her influence at Townley also increased: in 1952 she became a partner. But first the tight corset came back with Dior's New Look , as well as shoulder pads , high heels and zippers on the back. While Hollywood stars like Joan Crawford immortalized the New Look on the screen, they wore McCardell's designs in everyday life.

In 1954, McCardell was on the advisory board of a new magazine that became Sports Illustrated . In 1957 her book What Shall I Wear? The What, Where, When, and How Much of Fashion . In 1955 she presented dresses whose patterns were based on designs by Pablo Picasso , Marc Chagall , Fernand Léger and Joan Miró .

In 1957 McCardell was diagnosed with end-stage colon cancer. With the help of designer friend Mildred Orrick (1906–1994), she worked on her last collection from the hospital before she died in March 1958. After her death, her family decided to close the fashion label.

Influence on the fashion world

In 1981 the department store chain Lord & Taylor reissued the popover dress as part of a “McCardell retrospective”. Originals of McCardell's designs can now be found in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art , the LACMA and the Victoria & Albert Museum, among others .

In 1990, Life named McCardell one of the 100 Most Influential Americans of the 20th Century.

Designers such as Rudi Gernreich , Isaac Mizrahi , Donna Karan , Calvin Klein , Michael Kors , Norma Kamali and Cynthia Rowley were or are influenced by McCardell. Anna Sui's spring / summer 1999 collection was directly inspired by McCardell.

Awards

  • 1939: Award, New York World's Fair
  • 1943: Mademoiselle Merit Award
  • 1944: Coty American Fashion Critics' "Winnie" Award (for the popover dress)
  • 1946: Best Sportswear Designer Award
  • 1948: Neiman Marcus Award for Distinguished Service in the Field of Fashion
  • 1950: Women's National Press Club Award, presented by Harry S. Truman
  • 1956: Sports Illustrated American Sportswear Design Award
  • 1956: Parsons Medal for Distinguished Achievement
  • 1958: Coty American Fashion Critics' Award (Hall of Fame, posthumous)

Exhibitions

  • 1953: Retrospective, Frank Perls Gallery , Beverly Hills
  • 1971: Innovative Contemporary Fashion: Adri and McCardell, Smithsonian Institution , Washington, DC
  • 1985: All-American: A Sportswear Tradition , Fashion Institute of Technology, New York
  • 1987: Three Women: Madeleine Vionnet, Claire McCardell and Rei Kawakubo, Fashion Institute of Technology , New York
  • 1994: Parsons The New School for Design, New York
  • 1998: American Ingenuity: Sportswear, 1930s – 1970s , Metropolitan Museum of Art , New York
  • 1998: Fashion Institute of Technology, New York
  • 1998: Maryland Historical Society, Baltimore

Web links

Commons : Claire McCardell  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

literature

  • Claire McCardell: Redefining Modernism , ed. by Nancy Nolf, coal Yohannan, exh. Cat., Fashion Institute of Technology, New York 1998.
  • American Ingenuity: Sportswear 1930s – 1970s , ed. by Richard Martin, exh. Kat Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1998.
  • Valerie Steele : Women of Fashion: Twentieth Century Designers , New York, 1991.
  • American fashion: the life and lines of Adrian, Mainbocher, McCardell, Norell, Trigère , ed. by Sarah Tomerlin Lee, New York 1975.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Tim Gunn and Ada Calhoun: Tim Gunn's Fashion Bible: The Fascinating History of Everything in Your Closet . Simon and Schuster, New York 2013, ISBN 978-1-4516-4386-2 , pp. 43 ( google.de [accessed December 31, 2020]).
  2. ↑ Ingrid Loschek, Gundula Wolter: Reclams Mode and Costume Lexicon . 6th edition. Reclam, Stuttgart 2011, ISBN 978-3-15-010818-5 , pp. 456, 570-571 .
  3. ^ Robert McCardell Obituary (2009). The Frederick News-Post, February 3, 2009, accessed January 4, 2021 .
  4. ^ A b c d e Amy Huggins: Claire McCardell, MSA SC 3520-13581. In: Archives of Maryland. 2006, accessed December 31, 2020 (American English).
  5. ↑ José Blanco F., Patricia Kay Hunt-Hurst, Heather Vaughan, Mary D. Doering (Eds.): Clothing and Fashion: American Fashion from Head to Toe . ABC-CLIO, Santa Barbara 2015, ISBN 978-1-61069-310-3 ( google.de [accessed December 31, 2020]).
  6. ^ A b c d Alexandra Anderson: Six Degrees of Claire McCardell . In: Parsons The New School for Design (Ed.): Inspiring Women: Selected Designers from Parsons' Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Archives . New York 2010, p. 18-20 ( digitized version ).
  7. ↑ a b Brenda Polan, Roger Tredre: The Great Fashion Designers . Berg, Oxford / New York 2009, ISBN 978-0-85785-174-1 ( google.de [accessed December 31, 2020]).
  8. ^ A b Coal Yohannan: McCardell, Claire . In: Valerie Steele (Ed.): The Berg Companion to Fashion . Bloomsbury Publishing (UK), 2010, ISBN 978-1-4742-6471-6 , pp. 503-505 , doi : 10.5040 / 9781474264716.0011067 ( bloomsburyfashioncentral.com [accessed January 4, 2021]).
  9. ↑ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson: A Dress for Everyone. Claire McCardell took on the fashion industry - and revolutionized what women wear. In: The Washington Post Magazine. December 12, 2018, accessed January 3, 2021 (American English).
  10. ↑ Dorothy Shaver (1893-1959). The First Lady of Retailing. Smithsonian Institution, 2002, accessed January 4, 2021 .
  11. ^ Annemarie Strassel: Designing Women: Feminist Methodologies in American Fashion . In: Women's Studies Quarterly . tape 41 , no. 1/2 , 2012, ISSN  0732-1562 , p. 35-59 , JSTOR : 23611770 .
  12. ^ A b c d Sally Kirkland: McCardell, Claire . In: Barbara Sicherman, Carol Hurd Green (Eds.): Notable American Women. The Modern Period . Harvard University Press, Cambridge, London 1980, ISBN 978-0-674-97508-8 , pp. 437-439 , doi : 10.4159 / 9780674975088-016 ( degruyter.com [Retrieved on January 4, 2021]).
  13. ↑ a b c Jo Ahern: Claire and Rudi. In: Sports Illustrated. June 4, 1956; Retrieved January 11, 2021 (American English).
  14. ^ A b Sonnet Stanfill: Curating the Fashion City New York Fashion at the V&A . In: Fashion's World Cities . Oxford International Publishers Ltd, 2006, ISBN 978-0-85785-411-7 , doi : 10.2752 / 9780857854117 / fashwrldcit0012 ( bloomsburycollections.com [accessed January 4, 2021]).
  15. ↑ Thoroughly modern McCardell Designer: Frederick native Claire McCardell started a fashion revolution in the 1930s. Now, her legacy is being celebrated in a book, a gallery and a retrospective show. . Retrieved July 6, 2016.
  16. ^ The Museum at FIT - Online Collections . In: fashionmuseum.fitnyc.edu . Retrieved July 6, 2016.
  17. ↑ Constance CR White: Celebrating Claire McCardell . In: The New York Times , November 17, 1998. Retrieved July 6, 2016. 
  18. ^ A b Jill Fields: An Intimate Affair: Women, Lingerie, and Sexuality . University of California Press, 2007, ISBN 978-0-520-22369-1 ( google.de [accessed January 4, 2021]).
  19. ^ Jan Glier Reeder: High Style: Masterworks from the Brooklyn Museum Costume Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art . Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 2010, ISBN 978-1-58839-362-3 , pp. 128–129 ( google.de [accessed January 4, 2021]).
  20. ↑ Auctions by Date . In: www.augusta-auction.com . Retrieved July 6, 2016.
  21. ^ A b c Margo Seaman: Claire McCardell. In: Fashion Designer Encyclopedia. Retrieved January 4, 2021 .
  22. ^ The History of the Bodysuit. In: The Bodysuit Blog. June 19, 2017, accessed December 13, 2020 .
  23. ^ Dress and Belt, 1941-1958. The Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, accessed January 4, 2021 .
  24. ↑ a b c d e Finding Aids: Claire McCardell fashion sketches 1931-1958. In: The New School Archives & Special Collections. Retrieved January 4, 2021 .
  25. ^ Claire McCardell once named The High Priestess of Understatement (part 2). In: AGNauta Couture Blog. August 17, 2014, accessed January 18, 2021 .
  26. ↑ "popover" Dress - Objects - RISD MUSEUM . In: risdmuseum.org . Retrieved July 6, 2016.
  27. ↑ Woman's Dress, 'Monastic' | LACMA Collections . In: collections.lacma.org . Retrieved July 6, 2016.
  28. ^ Claire McCardell: Search Results. Victoria and Albert Museum, accessed January 4, 2021 .
  29. ^ LIFE Lists 20th Century's Most Influential Americans. In: Deseret News. September 1, 1990, accessed January 11, 2021 .
  30. ^ Sarah Sheehan: Anna Sui: Vogue Patterns, Part 2. In: Pattern-vault.com. January 10, 2014, accessed January 18, 2021 .
  31. ↑ Richard Martin, Sally Kirkland: ALL-AMERICAN: A Sportswear Tradition, April 4 - June 22, 1985, The Galleries at FIT In: Amazon. Retrieved January 4, 2021 .
  32. ↑ Fashion Flashback: Claire McCardell. CFDA, October 3, 2017, accessed January 18, 2021 .
personal data
SURNAME McCardell, Claire
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American fashion designer
DATE OF BIRTH May 24, 1905
PLACE OF BIRTH Frederick (Maryland)
DATE OF DEATH March 22, 1958
Place of death New York City