The Great American Designer

But America has "brans", brands that make mass-produced, casual, sporty, comfortable clothing for everyone. And we're a young country, but when you think about it, our fashion design history is even younger, like who are the titans of American fashion design? Donna Karen, Tommy Hilfiger, Calvin Klein, Ralph Lauren, these designers who are all still alive.

“But if you want to look at where these great fashion designers got it all from, there was a great American fashion designer, who many of them were looking to.”

Calvin Klein, I quote in the book, like he said she's the one who did it. She's the one who set the stage and set the standard. "This is journalist Elizabeth Evans Dickinson, we were speaking live on stage at the New York Historical for this interview and it's the little stagey echo." And we were talking about this designer, who made so many of the classics of the American wardrobe. This was a woman who was responsible for much of what was in my closet.

Ballet flats, mix and match separates, wrap dresses, denim and women's wear, hoodies, and I was shocked that I had never heard her name.

Her name was Claire McCartell. And Elizabeth wrote a brilliant book about her called Claire McCartell, the designer who set women free. And if you talk to designers today, many of them will say that Claire McCartell is part of their design inspiration, whether that's Anna Sweet, who I've talked to about her or Michael Coors or Tory Burch. Claire McCartell was doing what many of those designers were doing decades earlier.

“All of her clothes you could wear today, Claire made halter tops and wrap dresses and leotards and pants with big practical pockets.”

Generally very cute, totally modern clothes that women would love to wear now. But they were designed at a very different time.

Like this is a designer who was born in 1905.

You had boning in your bodice and you had crinolines, Claire grew up in an era when clothes were worn completely differently. You had one dress for when you were asleep and you had another dress for when you were doing your house chores. And then you had a day dress and that involved a corset. And sure by the time Claire was studying at Parsons, it was the 1920s women were starting to get rid of corsets and stuff like that. But for a while she was still wearing poofy crinoline underskirts.

Like her quote was, "I don't hate crinolines, I just hate when they try and get into an elevator because like what when we're being asked to where you couldn't get into a cab. You couldn't ride this subway, you couldn't get into an elevator." And it's not like Claire could just wear pants. She legally couldn't. There were municipal laws. There were vice codes about what you were allowed to wear and not to wear.

“And a lot of this was about gendering fashion, right?”

If you were not wearing what was considered appropriate to your gender, you could go to jail. I mean there were other ones. I kept going through the book. Like new laws kept popping up all the time. I was like, "Well, women were required to wear a hat." It's like seriously, when they went swimming, they had to wear swim stockings.

Like are you kidding me? Like there's so many things that they had to wear and keep track of at risk of being fined or put in jail. And this lasted kind of a long time. It wasn't just like, "Oh, when she was a little kid, it was like in her lifetime." I mean, one of my favorite slash least favorite stories was about the kindergarten teacher in Los Angeles. Can you tell me that one?

This was in the 30s, around the time that Claire was just starting to really break out with this unstructured, comfortable sportswear. There is this woman across the coast, who got robbed. She was held up. And she was at court to testify against the men who robbed her. But the judge was more concerned by the fact that she was wearing pants. And he said she needed to go home and change into a dress.

And she refused. And he jailed her. I forget this. Being a woman was a very different experience in the early 20th century. There weren't even women's rooms in most public buildings at the time. When Claire Macartle left her home in Maryland to move to New York City, it wasn't like being carry Bradshaw.

If you were a single woman trying to come to the city, there was no place for you to live. Women couldn't rent a hotel room because then it was thought you were a prostitute. So women usually had to live in boarding houses with very strict rules and early curfews, like you were a kid. I mean, you still had to have a male signature to get a checking account. You still had to have a male escort to get under restaurants.

So Claire Macartle was amazing. She was a woman at a time when it was exceedingly difficult just to be a woman.

But also she had her name on a line of clothing when American fashion design hardly existed.

The fashion designers were in France. New York was where the factories were.

The garment district was thriving, but it was primarily a manufacturing hub for turning out Parisian copies. In New York, they were supposed to be making knock-offs of the French silk gowns. They weren't supposed to be making the sort of cute, practical clothes that Claire wanted to make. And yet, a lot of what she created in the 1930s and 40s really laid the foundation for modern ready to wear American clothing. So how did Claire Macartle beat the odds?

And a time when women couldn't do anything, an American fashion designer didn't exist.

“How did she become the great American fashion designer?”

And create so much of what's in our closets and go on to inspire generations of American designers after her. And yet, still somehow, for a time, get so thoroughly forgotten. After the break. Before we start today's show, we want to shout out another member of the Radiotopia family, radio diaries. For almost 30 years, radio diaries has been helping people document their own lives and histories.

Now they're back with a new series called Orson Wells and the Blind Soldier, about a small town crime that sparked the desegregation of the US military. In 1946, a Black World War II veteran named Isaac Woodard was blinded by a white police officer. Nobody knew who the officer was or where the attack happened. But when famed director Orson Wells found out about the attack, he pledged to not only broadcast it, but solve it on the radio week by week.

“Wash your hands off a Syrex wash them well scrub and scour. You won't blood out the blood of a blinded war veteran. You're going to be uncovered. We will blast out your name.”

And I will find means to remove from you all refuge of a Syrex. You can't get rid of me. This series is a riveting true crime investigation told by descendants, activists, and the last known witness to the attack. Listen to Orson Wells and the Blind Soldier out now wherever you get your podcasts or at radiotopia.fm. The American look was this wholesome, sporty, mass-produced style for the wholesome, sporty modern woman. And it was pioneered by a whole cohort of designers like Elizabeth Hawes and Bonnie Cashon and Zelda Windell Des.

Many of these designers were women, many of them were Black women, but none were as famous. As Claire Macardol. So this is a Claire Macardol collection? In her lifetime, Claire Macardol was really, really famous. Just the sheer amount of press that we're looking at here speaks to her presence within American fashion at the time.

We're looking at like five linear feet of material that are just Claire's press clippings. I got a tour through the library of the Fashion Institute of Technology from April Calahan, who you might recognize as the co-host of dressed, the fantastic podcast about fashion. In her old-day job, April was the Special Collections Associate at FIT, which has this great collection of Claire Macardol clippings. Oh, that is so cute. Oh my god, I love that look. And that was Claire.

Yeah, I mean, these are Claire's designs. She did model her own designs though, quite frequently. Claire Macardol was even on the cover of Time Magazine in 1955. She was a constant source of public fascination. Is this a profile of her from Vogue?

Claire Macardol is the European's version of the typical American girl whom you never saw, but read about him print.

Now we know who that girl was. The one who shared top billing with your beautiful tall buildings. It was Claire Macardol, actually. Claire Macardol was sort of the ideal American. She was tall and broad shouldered and spunky, and she had the sort of can-do attitude. And she never really fit in with her time. Like she always wore her hair long, regardless of what everyone else was doing. Like even in the 1930s and 40s when everybody else had their hair short, she was always doing her own thing.

So her clothes also were always hearty and spunky and timeless and always very, very practical even when they were elegant. This is a classic Claire has a scoop neckline, very simple but very elegant. It could be a sunrise, but it could also be an evening gown. Or here's another classic Claire.

“What's so Claire about this skirt or the two patch pockets on the front?”

Big pockets, right? So the stripes on the skirt are running vertical, but the pockets are running horizontally. So it's like this very simple design element, that's smart. A spunky, clever, all-American style by a spunky, clever, all-American girl.

And Claire was always called a girl.

Every article I read that was written in her lifetime, basically called her girl.

She was still called a girl at 50. So that girl thing is of course super condescending, and it's really different from the refined lady designers of Europe. Like Coco Chanel or Elsa Scaperle. But Claire McCartil also had a really different approach than they did. Claire had this more youthful, exuberant quality to her.

She was always more of a tomboy.

“I think that growing up in rural Maryland with three brothers helped a lot because she was out running around in the countryside.”

And she had this great quote that said, "A dress can be pretty, but climbing a tree in it, forget it." From a young age, Claire understood that her brothers could do things that she couldn't. And part because of what they were. Claire said, "I want to go to New York after high school." And she's like, "I want to make clothes."

Claire's father was baffled, and would not allow it. And I see where he was coming from. The triangle shirt-ways factory fire had just happened. The garment industry in New York was not a glamorous thing. It was a dangerous thing. She eventually wore her parents down and was on a train up to Parsons.

And because, as you know, at the time there were very few places that a young woman could live alone in New York City,

“Claire stayed in a place called the Three Arts Club.”

And the Three Arts Club was meant for women. Many age really, it wasn't just for college students, but there were a lot of college students there. And she had a safe place to live and come home to every night. And the Three Arts Club ended up being really vital for Claire's career, because another woman who lived at the Three Arts Club connected Claire with a manufacturer and a designer named Robert Turk. And it's interesting because when I read originally about Robert Turk, I thought he was decades older than Claire,

because the way that magazine articles and newspaper articles at the time discuss a young man is being already fully formed and made. And I was shocked to learn they were like a few years apart in age. And Claire was being called like a gal. But anyway, Claire began working with Turk. Turk was this young man who was very entrepreneurial, started his own line.

And what Turk was doing was he was copying Paris, like every other designer. In the United States, everyone copied Paris. That's just what was done, but there were two ways to copy the designs from Paris. The legal way to do it was you licensed it. You could work with theitor house to buy an addition of a design to make a licensed copy. This is what a lot of department stores did, but the way everybody really did it in New York was they stole it.

New York designers would just go to a Paris runway show and memorize what they saw. And then you would go back out and you would quickly sketch it. And then the buyers and the department store owners would take it. And copy it. Claire hated this. She did not love the copying. She didn't like the stealing. It made her deeply uncomfortable. She was often told to go to burglars or blooming dails and quote unquote shop the store.

And what that meant was the manufacturers would send their young designers into the department stores to steal the licensed Parisian designs. She was spying basically and she didn't want to do it. She was like not happy. And so she left and she went and sat on a bench and she just made up her own drawings and slid him into the stack.

Claire never admitted she had made up her own designs, but Turk just quietly put her in charge of the sample room instead of sending her out to be a spy again.

He just made Claire the head of production and never said why. Where he differed from everyone else is he took her seriously and he trained her and he showed her the ropes. Robert Turk recognized Claire's talent in a world where women were usually left out of any sort of mentorship opportunities. Robert Turk really took her under his wing. And because of that she started to really understand the business of fashion.

“And then life is so well, the Great Depression hit and in 1931 Robert Turk sells his company to another company called Townley.”

Townley was this big sportswear manufacturer so they've sold out. Now Robert Turk and Claire McCartil are working for this big company called Townley. The head of Townley was like such from central casting as he was Henry Geiss. He was described as a harassed veteran of 7th Avenue. Geiss did not care about beautiful clothes. He wanted to make good numbers.

He was not interested in original designs. He wanted what was going to sell. He, you know, just put a bow on it was what he would say. And then right in the middle of a collection for this big new manufacturer. Robert Turk dies. He does in this really tragic accident.

He basically drowned trying to save his brother.

Turk had taken his 11 year old brother swimming and died on the eve of his 29th birthday. So Turk dies suddenly in the middle of a collection. Geiss had no choice. He had no choice. He had to turn to Turk's assistant.

She had to finish the collection and she pulled it off and she pulled it off beautifully. And then she came ahead designer.

“Claire became the head designer of Townley Frux, which is really impressive.”

But of course Geiss was not interested in Claire's original designs. She was still told that she needed to copy Paris. Even though Claire was begging Geiss to let her design clothes that were more dynamic and more wearable with more pockets.

She was always dressing for her own needs as a modern woman in New York, a career girl.

Literally that idea of I need to go from morning to night in the same dress and get on the subway. But what she started to do was she started to wear her own clothes. Just wearing her own clothes around to work at Townley Frux. And that was how in 1938 Claire had her first breakout design. And the only reason it was sold was because she wore it to work one day and accidentally bumped into the buyer

from the department store best in company. And this dress that this buyer saw at Claire wearing was unlike any he had ever seen before. And what was so revolutionary about this dress is this one manufacturer said my God, it has no front, it has no back. Where do you zip it? It had no structure.

“This dress would be called the monastic dress.”

Her famous monastic dress was almost like a monks' classic because you could belt it and fit it to your own body. The monastic is a dress that would go over your head, so we might think of it as a tent dress. This is sewing expert in fashion historian Julie Elber, who has in her own words, this crazy obsession with Claire McCartil and her designs.

Julie has an amazing collection of McCartil clothes.

I've been on eBay a lot in the last 10 years. Let's just put it that way. Wow. So, a monastic dress is like a tent dress, but there are straps or belts to tighten it around your waist so you can fit it to your size. This is a beautiful dress that's probably from 1949, 1950 that is kind of a regression version of the monastic dress.

So it's almost like a sack, like it doesn't have any zipper buttons or anything. Exactly. It's hard to imagine that a dress this simple was so revolutionary, but it really was. And then has these beautiful leather belts that she designed as well, and so fairly chic classy.

“You could wear it out in New York tonight.”

Right. It was like, wow, something sexy and fun and easy didn't have to be tightly fitted. This is this lovely dress that is made for somebody who might be a little bloated some days. You know? The monastic dress took off.

If that dress was a smash success that sold out, Georgia O'Keefe was a big fan, Lauren Bakal was a big fan, not of Clare yet of the dress at this point. No one knew Clare, Makartil was behind the design. No one knew she made it, because her name was not the label. Because at that time, designers did not have their names on the labels of clothes.

It was either the department store or it was the manufacturer. It was just townly frocks behind this design, but they really hand up how genius this dress was. It's the most talkative, most successful dress of the season. April Callahan in the fashion institute archives again. Everybody lost their mind.

Viminastic was a sensation because nobody had ever seen anything like it. Even Clare's boss. How are guys set at the time? No one had ever seen anything like Clare's designs.

Although Clare was always very candid that she wasn't the first to make a built-in sack dress ever.

She spoke very openly about her inspiration in women's wear daily in November 1940. It says Clare doesn't make any eye was first with it claims about fashion. Take the case of the monastic dress for instance. There was an Algerian costume that so intrigued her that what she made it up in a red wool and dress along the same loose lines, Belting it with a black leather belt.

So yes, Clare was inspired by an Algerian dress. Originality can be a little fuzzy in fashion. However, that said, almost as soon as the monastic dress came out it was immediately exactly directly ripped off. It's in the advertisement for the monastic dress. Success breeds imitation copies under various names have appeared all over the country.

At prices ranging from the obviously cheap to the extravagantly expensive. This is wild that it was introduced five weeks ago and they're like so aware that it's everywhere. It's a phenomenon that this dress spurred. Which is so funny, right? This is a dress by a company that until this point was just ripping off French designers.

But as soon as they had their own original design ripped off, they were like no. It was copied all over the market despite efforts to protect it. And then when she did the monastic dress, it got knocked off so much that her boss Henry guys had a complete nervous breakdown. Historian and soist Julie Elber again. Essentially, Geist wasn't prepared for such a huge hit for Townley Frogs.

There's a huge backlog of orders for the monastic dress.

“And then Townley couldn't compete with their own knock-offs.”

A competition outrand them. The monastic dress should have launched Townley into the stratosphere. But instead, it hobbled them with legal fees. As my cardal route, Geist has made such a mess of everything. So she ironically having the most successful dress on 7th Avenue.

She got fired. And then Claire just needed a job. She ended up working unhappily with Haddy Carnegie for a while. Haddy Carnegie was not actually related to steel magnate Andrew Carnegie. That's exactly what she'd want you to think.

She was just a Jewish immigrant who changed her last name to something that sounded impressive. Some sort of obsessed with her. She's kind of iconic.

But ultimately, Haddy Carnegie was more of a society lady who liked to fancy herself a designer.

“Haddy took all the credit, but she had this wonderful stable of designers.”

The two women did not go well together. Haddy Carnegie was overseeing a precision glamorous tailoring shop. And Claire McCartel was a modernist deconstructing clothes to their simplest forms. It was not a fit. Like, for example, a Broadway actress who had come to Haddy Carnegie was apoplectic

that Claire McCartel designed her a simple, paired-down dress. Haddy Carnegie's customers wanted sequins and beads. And found Claire's things too plain for the money. Carnegie knew her customers wanted to be poured and stitched right into their clothes. So Haddy Carnegie was miffed when Claire won a contest in the 1939 World's Fair.

Claire and our letters were all excited because somebody from the Times wanted to talk to her. And then instead Miss Carnegie stepped in and did the interview. So they were, they were at Lagerhead's quite a bit. But a weird benefit of working for society lady Haddy Carnegie was this.

“Claire was among just a handful of designers and editors who were the last to see Paris before it was taken over by the Nazis.”

I mean, it was kind of a dumb move. They kind of went too Paris as World War II was breaking out. The war was officially on in Europe. It was that moment where everybody was waiting for what Hitler would do. Everyone was taking World War II very lightly.

And Natasha at the French Embassy speculated, the Germans will attack this spring and be stopped. Then the Hitler machine will collapse. And a number of society ladies and designers and editors from American fashion magazines were like, "We have to go to Europe and support the Cotour this season anyway." And so Haddy is like, "Well, it'd be damned. We're going."

And Haddy was Jewish and her family is like, "You're not going to Europe right now. This is insanity." Haddy, you know, I'm obsessed with you. And she reluctantly stayed behind and Claire went. Claire's parents were understandably also worried that their daughter was walking into World War II.

Claire wrote, "Please don't worry about it. It's a wonderful opportunity." And I can break my next skiing, too. Way too cavalier. So Lotta, Claire went to France and ended up spending 24 hours without water, food, or sleep. There were gas masks in the Cotour room at Maxim's.

And she wrote these just poignant letters home about what it was like to see Paris as this build-up to war was happening. She wrote, "There are no bombs. No actual fighting at the front. But there is a sickness that is much worse than the war. It's the change, the end of something and not knowing what it will be after." A few months later Paris went dark and it was gone.

The center of global fashion disappeared. Among all the many more immediate and dire concerns of war, all the New York fashion designers had no idea where they were going to get next season's designs. Where's the pipeline of ideas going to come? You can hear Claire's brain start to churn with new ideas.

This is 1939. Can you read that pop on? Yeah. Claire McCartel dressed designer for haddy Carnegie predicted a swing away from the voluptuously feminine figure towards a boyish slenderness.

Quote wartime always ushered in a feeling for uniforms in fashion, she said.

As World War II would go on, Claire would design civil defense uniforms. She did design uniforms, yeah. She designed red cross uniforms at one point. It was no way Claire would stay working for the society lady haddy Carnegie. She eventually left right around the time that the war was being waged in Paris and they couldn't go back to Paris anymore. And so then she was brought back into town like the new head of Tallyfrox cleverly lured Claire back.

But Claire considering that she had been fired a couple of times when she came back. She put all of her cards on a table because she said, "I'm going to have my name on the label and I'm going to do my designs the way I want them to be done." And for somebody to be doing that on 7th Avenue was really, really pretty ballsy on her part.

And she was the first designer to be given full creative control.

“She got her name stitched onto the label in the 1940s.”

Labels proudly said, Claire McCartel for Tallyfrox. And one of the things that Claire started doing at Tallyfrox, she was moving very far away from the Okatore idea. She wanted to harness mass production. She said, "We are a mass production country. We want to give the best to all people."

All of us deserve the right to good fashion. Claire made use of humble fabrics. Cut and gang um, denim, that kind of thing. Not only because they were affordable, anybody could wear it, and it could be mass produced.

They were also sturdy. So she was thinking about how to make something that was both beautiful. But they could also be washable. It could be wrinkle-free. And this was wild to make dresses out of denim.

Like, there was lady Levi's in the 30s, but there was no denim in women's wear.

It was a gendered fabric. And this resourcefulness became especially useful once the United States entered World War II in 1941. Because the fabrics that Americans had access to became incredibly limited. The rationing was really strict.

“Very few fabrics were allowed to be used.”

Most were held for military use. General limitation order L85 banned fabric hungry fashions. No more pleats. No more French cuffs on pants. Sculpt up to be shorter and tighter.

And you couldn't have aprons. Belts couldn't be wider than two inches. Women's slacks couldn't have belts at all. The belted fabric heavy monastic dress became a relic of the past. And this is where McCartil just thrived.

Because she was really creative. A lot of designers were very annoyed by all these wartime constraints. But Claire McCartil loved them. She thought these limitations were fun challenges. And here's a perfect example.

She was a ration during World War II. And she figured out a way that you could get around it in that ballet shoes were not rationed. So she went to Compasio, the famous dance shoe maker, and said, "Would you make some that match my outfits?" Ta-da!

“The creation of the ballet flat borrowed from the ballet dancer for live young Americans”

by Claire McCartil for her tally frog's collection. And during the war, out of necessity, Claire created one of her most famous designs. A version of the rap dress. She was essentially recruited into it by iconic fashion editor

Diana Reland. Claire had been called into Diana Reland's office. Diana was very melodramatic. She's like, "Wim it a suffering, Claire. They're suffering!"

Middle and upper class women were suffering. Because now they had to do their own housework. And Reland said, "We need something that social lights can wear, darling when we're cleaning our houses, because all of our domestic help have left and gone through the defense plan."

The families that used to hire an immigrant girl to do all the cooking and cleaning now couldn't. Particularly a wartime domestic help started going to the factories and that generation had to learn how to cook. Claire herself had to learn how to cook for the first time.

And she actually got really into it. She took cooking lessons. She got quite good. It was kind of a novelty. It was sort of like leading up to the whole Julia Child thing

in the '60s when all of a sudden, cooking became this much bigger deal in the US. But this is why women were suffering, quote-unquote, because they needed clothes that they could both cook and entertain in. Here she is.

She's going to clean her house now.

She never had to do it before.

You can see this in Harper's Bazaar. There's a spread featuring a socialite wife of a polo player. She says, "I'm doing my own work. The ideal garment for it for cooking, dusting, scrubbing, painting,

pottering, or any odd job around the house. Designed by Claire, my cardal Lord and Taylor has it." That's where Claire came in with her brand new dress. It's called the popover because you could pop it over your clothes. It was a little wrap around dress.

Cute charming, which could easily slip on for getting a little messier. And this was one of the great wartime inventions that Claire made and that became wildly famous and sort of pioneered the wrap dress. Earlier versions even had an oven mitt attached. And the oven mitt is attached with a string to the actual dress.

So you don't lose it. And as April reminded me, it's not just an oven mitt that mitt could be used to prod logs in the fire. It's anything. It could be used in the kitchen.

It could be used in the garden. It could be used in the garden. It could be used doing chores. So it really wasn't all purpose style. Eventually though, the oven mitt went away.

The popover just became a wrap dress that she kept in her collection for decades. Claire brought it back year after year after year after year, and various different incarnations, and in varying levels of formality.

Her dress was reselling for $30, which in 1930 wasn't cheap. Oh my god, that's $582 today.

“But then when the war came, her most popular style of the popover you could get for $395.”

That's like $78. And there's a lot of people in the world that can't afford to buy a McCartil because they weren't cheap. So, Julie Elder says, many, many people sewed their own popovers. Claire McCartil encouraged this. She released sewing patterns through the Spadia sewing pattern company in the early 50s through the mid 50s.

And she was the believer in getting her designs out to the masses. Because Claire McCartil's designs were really supposed to help you live better.

She always put her closures on the side or in the front.

So women could dress themselves, which is like duh. But back in Claire's time, a lot of dresses required someone else to zip you up or button you in. She said, "You may live alone and like it, but if you can't get your zipper up and you wrench out your arm, that's just terrible." Claire was a real advocate for independent living. She herself lived alone until she was 37, which is like shockingly late in her time.

She married very late. Marriage wasn't important to her. And when Claire did eventually marry, it wasn't a traditional marriage by any measure.

“Part of it was that she was really the breadwinner and the family.”

Her husband was kind of a nearer to well. Yeah, yeah. His first marriage had been to an Eris. So he had long since stopped working even when he did not get a payout from his first wife's estate.

When they got married, Claire became not just the breadwinner,

but she was also stepmother to his kids while she's running this big business. But somehow they've worked it out and it was apparently a love match. And it's an extremely handsome, very, very socially adept. This was where Claire needed help. She was secretly painfully shy.

He would take her out dancing at the rooftop of the St. Regis and he knew a lot of people. And really she was this very introverted person. And so he gave her this really wonderful social life. Claire was living a completely modern life in the 1940s. She had these really strong convictions.

And she machete this new uncharted path with her comfortable, practical clothes that allowed women to be free. Here, the villainous music here comes Dior. Because they were getting cinched back in. Christian Dior made extraordinary clothes.

I don't want to turn them into a cartoonish villain, but that guy really loved tiny, structured waste. He called it the Wasp waste. He was like, "How small could you get that waste?" Claire Macarto was about fitting a woman's body,

not making a woman fit her designs. And Claire got into a media spat with the French. She was angry. She said, "Why are we going backwards? What are we doing?" Everything Claire fought for to have a woman feel free and open in her body. We're going right back to this thing.

But of course, Christian Dior became much more famous than Claire Macarto. And there are a few reasons why. And they're not all sexism. After the break. Hi, I'm Nicole Phelps, Global Director of Vogue Runway in Vogue Business

and host of The Run Through Podcast. Every Tuesday, join me for the latest fashion news like the Shake-up's of Balenciaga and Dior and what's trending in Paris and Milan. You'll also hear interviews with top designers from Marc Jacobs and Rick Owens to Daniel Rosbury,

Sarah Burton and many more. On Thursdays, Chloe Mall, editor of Vogue.com in Chamanati, head of editorial content at British Vogue, take you behind the scenes at Vogue and share their thoughts on fashion through the lens of culture.

You'll hear interviews with some of your favorite stars, like Julian Moore, Pharrell Williams, and Celebrity Stylus Law Roach. Join us to get your fashion and culture news twice a week, listen to the run through with Vogue every Tuesday and Thursday. Wherever you get your podcasts.

I think what you think about the 50s,

“that's what you picture is that Dior look.”

The hourglass form, that Dior shape, that is the 1950s, that really tight ways that hoofed outskirt, that pretty dressed. That look was the announcement that Paris was back, baby. So 1947, Paris is trying to get its footing again.

They want to reclaim their status as the center of culture and fashion. And Christian Dior, one thing I did not realize is he was the same age as Clare. They were born a few months apart. Christian Dior was three months older than Clare McCartel. Dior was actually new to fashion, newer to fashion than she was.

But you know, Clare was a girl.

He had his first collection come out in 1947,

and it was wildly anticipated, because they needed something to save the oak guitar tradition.

He wanted to put them back on a pedestal. And in a lot of ways what Dior wanted was to go back to his beloved mother's Victorian era, like very structured clothing. Women were now supposed to go back to being the shape of the number eight. And he unleashed the new look.

It's said that Carmel Snow was the one who called it Oak. Christian one, such a new look.

There's mixed attribution of where that first came.

And it was people went wild for it, because it felt like Paris's back. It was the ultimate declaration that war was over. He created these long skirts. And the thing is, after the war, remember all the rationing and the tight short skirts. When McCartel was asked by a fashion editor, "What do you think is coming?"

She said, "Oh, we're going to have really long beautiful skirts." And she effectively did a new look design, which she was doing the long full skirts again. But she wasn't putting anyone into this understructure. Yeah, there was a way to make this statement without the discomfort. One of his models in his new look corset fainted during preparation for the show.

And he told it in this joke, "Ha ha, he fainted." People were getting hurt. The other thing that irritated her so much about Dior is you had to like get help to get dressed

because they're all these little tiny buttons up the back.

She's like, "Oh, we're going back. We're going back to this time where women are supposed to be dressed up and put on display." And Claire didn't see it as a new look. She saw it as a regression. You can't go back.

“You have to design for the lives American women lead today.”

This is what Claire McCartel said in 1955 to a promising young journalist. She got branded the gall who defied Dior in this article written by a young Betty Fernand. And Betty was noticing the way the door was closing shut on women again on the 50s. After the freedoms they were experiencing in the 30s and 40s. The feminine mystique would come out eight years later.

But Claire McCartel didn't get to read it. Claire died very young. She died at 52. She had what we now understand to be a genetic predisposition to colon cancer. At the time they did not understand that. Claire McCartel died on March 22nd, 1958.

Only shortly after Christian Dior died in October of the previous year. These two designers had been born months apart and they died months apart. They both, in their similar life spans, completely upended what women wore and what we consider fashion to be. Well, this leads to like the big question, which is why is Dior so much more famous than Claire McCartel? Why wasn't Claire McCartel Dior?

“I think there's a lot of reasons for this.”

One is her label wasn't carried forward. Claire didn't own her own label. She had worked her way up, apparently. She was working for a seventh avenue manufacturer and she ended up getting to become a partner in that company. But then when she was gone, they didn't know what to do about it.

I mean, there weren't any designers for ready to wear. There weren't names on mass production clothes. That was new. There was no protocol here. So, Claire McCartel, when she died, talent tried to keep her label alive, probably for about a year, year and a half.

But what they quickly learned was that they, at the time, didn't have a lot of models for what it looked like to keep someone's name going in a ready to wear line in America. And have another designer, but also they just didn't know how to replace her. She was somewhat irreplaceable and so they made the decision to let the line die. She pioneered the fashion designer as we understand it today.

And so, because she was first,

it also meant that there was no pattern for what you did after a designer died. But I also think that what I realized and researching this book is we forgot all the names of the women of this era. Elizabeth Haas, Zelda Windveldas, Bonnie Cashon, and low men, and many, many more.

Unfortunately, they weren't prioritized in the storytelling. None of these American women could have been Dior. Dior was capable of owning his own business, which was high fashion. It was oat couture.

It was considered high art.

“I think that Dior's name carried on, because it's label carried on.”

But can I tell you something? Dior's label almost didn't carry on. After Dior passed away, his company was barely limping through the 1960s. When hippie fashion had taken over,

and there were fewer customers clamoring for custom ball gowns. The brand survived by licensing out its name, slapping Dior on sunglasses and bags and highs and men's shirts. And by the early '80s, 90% of Dior's sales were licenses. They held 260 licenses worldwide for products made by other companies.

Dior immediately made cheaply with Saudi construction that were not up to luxury standards.

They developed a terrible reputation,

“and their finances fell into horrible disarray.”

And so Dior was bought out, and it lay in the bowels of a big holding company. Until 1984, when this holding company, was bought by an elegant French real estate developer, named Bernard Arno, who immediately began to clean house,

and fired 8,000 workers, and ditched anything in the holding company that wasn't Dior. He found Dior, this diamond in the rough, and he polished it, and he used it as his anchor to create the biggest luxury empire in history.

LVMH, the company that owns most designer brands, and Sephora, and all the duty free stores, and it has made Bernard Arno, one of the top 10 richest men in the world. So that's another reason why we all know Dior's name.

Nothing like that has happened with Claremakartil. But it's not really about just superficially reviving her name, or fixing the label back on address again.

This was a movement that was always about more than close.

It was really about autonomy and freedom, and a capacity to choose how you wanted to live your life. And so, well, it might not be a full-blown revival of the Claremakartil brand.

“I think Julie Elber is doing exactly what Claremakartil”

would have wanted. I got together with my friend Jenny Rushmore, who runs the Kashmir at Pattern Company. With the Kashmir at Pattern Company, you can buy the patterns as a PDF and print them out.

So anyone from anywhere can order them. So people are making these all over the world of it. And Julie has helped them make a version of a pattern of Claremakartil's monastic dress. These are a couple of different versions of that you made.

That you made dress that I made. From a size 0 to size 32. And now people are making the most party dress that's in the wearing them. We could wear it to a wedding. You could wear it to the beach.

Oh, I love this. Isn't it great? It's great. Isn't it beautiful? It's beautiful.

And this dress looks just as timeless, just as elegant, just as comfortable. As it did,

when Claremakartil first wore it to work.

88 years ago. Articles of interest is made by me. Avery Truffleman with music by Ray Royal, Sassami, and Lullatone. Mixed by Morgan Flannery, mastered by Pedro Rafael Rosado,

both of the super talented team over at PRX. Thanks for your help, guys. Elizabeth Evett Stickinson's book once again is called Claremakartil, the designer who set women free. It's really amazing.

People count on hands podcast. If you don't already listen to it, I can't believe you don't already listen to it. It's called Dress. And Julie Elber is a sewing genius.

“If you want to print out a version of her monastic dress pattern”

and make it for yourself, I will have a link up at Articles of interest. Substack.com Radio to Peot. From PRX.