ANDREW LIMBONG, HOST:
Let's talk about pockets for a second. When I wear a suit, I've got two front pockets and two back pockets on my pants. On my jacket, I've got the two pockets on the side, and there's the breast pocket. There are usually two or three other pockets on the inside. And plus, there's usually a pocket on my shirt. But here's the dirty little secret. I'm not carrying that much stuff. Now, my wife, on the other hand - when she finds a dress she likes with just two pockets, it is as if she had dug up a rare and valuable gem from the depths of the earth. Now, why am I babbling on and on about pockets? What does this pocket gender disparity say about us as a society?
ELIZABETH EVITTS DICKINSON: So there really is this fascinating and illuminating history about why women don't get to have pockets in their clothes to this day.
LIMBONG: That's Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson. She just wrote a book titled "Claire McCardell: The Designer Who Set Women Free." It's about the fashion designer who, in the 1930s and '40s, revolutionized the way we think about women's clothing, including pockets.
DICKINSON: McCardell always understood the psychology of clothes. She understood how it felt to move through the world, and sometimes you needed a place not just to put your items - like your lipstick and your keys - but also to put your hands. And she understood that it was very important to have a pocket not just in a pair of pants, but in dresses and skirts, and she fought to include them in all her clothes.
LIMBONG: We met with Dickinson at the Maryland Center for History and Culture, which is hosting an exhibit on McCardell's work. Walking in, it feels kind of like a department store - about a dozen or so mannequins lining the walls, all wearing McCardell designs. They have a similar silhouette, fitted at the top with a skirt that flows down from the waist. All different types of colors and textures. I scan the room, and we land on a popover dress.
DICKINSON: Which is basically a wrap dress - and so I think a lot of people think that Diane von Furstenberg pioneered the wrap dress.
LIMBONG: But Dickinson says it began with McCardell. This version is white with a thin black patterning. It comes in at the waist, with a simple belt you can tie into a knot.
DICKINSON: So during World War II, there was this increasingly difficult challenge, which is what do women wear? This was something that Claire McCardell made in 1942 as a dress for women to easily pop on and off while they were working around the house, going to the factories and just having to take care of their lives while their spouses were deployed abroad.
LIMBONG: The popover dress is one that is elegant yet highly functional. Dickinson says that's by design, literally.
DICKINSON: It's really a very simple cotton dress that originally was meant to pop over your existing clothes, almost like an oversized apron. And Claire made this out of a material that was rarely used in women's wear at the time. She made it out of denim. And the original had a big patch pocket because she wanted women to have a place to put a garden trowel or a flashlight when there were blackout drills during the war.
LIMBONG: This was a time when women were facing a new world, and they needed functional clothes to help them navigate it, which includes swimwear. We walk up to a glass case. It features a swimsuit that McCardell first designed in 1936. It looks fairly similar to a one-piece bathing suit you might find today, with maybe a bit more coverage in the rear, except it's made out of wool.
I will say, the first time I saw this, I was like, that sounds crazy. That sounds super uncomfortable. I can't conceive of wearing a wool bathing suit. But then I read your book, and in the context of what was going on at swimwear, a wool bathing suit seemed like a pretty good option. So (laughter) tell us about how this came to be.
DICKINSON: It really was. I mean, they were called bathing suits originally for a reason 'cause women were supposed to wear almost, like, dresses with skirts, and it was only to go in and sort of wade in and, you know, take a dip. McCardell was a swimmer, and she always wanted to have swimwear that would move with her in the water and actually be something that you could swim in.
Not only were there wool bathing suits, but in the '20s, there were wool swim stockings. You were required as a woman to cover your legs on public beaches. And McCardell - she did not believe in that at all. She got in trouble in her 20s for peeling her wool stockings off. And in her career, she designed bathing suits that both fit women's bodies but also could swim, could dry quickly on the beach. And they were a little bit scandalous at the time because there was no swim skirt. There was fabric between the legs. And McCardell always had, again, the experience of the woman in mind. She wanted them to look beautiful, but she also wanted them to be able to swim.
LIMBONG: Have you ever tried one of these guys on?
DICKINSON: Oh, my gosh, I wish, right? I...
LIMBONG: OK, I was going to...
DICKINSON: But I would get in trouble if I broke through that.
LIMBONG: Sure. Sure, sure, sure.
DICKINSON: They know to lock up the dresses when I'm around.
LIMBONG: I see. I see.
McCardell began her professional career after training at the Parsons School of Design in New York and spending some time in Paris. But Dickinson says McCardell's passion for fashion began elsewhere.
So she was born in Frederick, Maryland.
DICKINSON: That's right, 1905.
LIMBONG: Shout out to Frederick, Maryland. Love the place - good beer, good hiking. I don't necessarily think of it as, like, a fashion hotbed. So how did she get interested in design and clothing?
DICKINSON: So, you know, in 1905, most women made their own clothes. Ready-to-wear didn't exist, really, at the time. There were a handful of things you could buy off the rack or off the shelves, but for the most part, you either sewed your own clothes by memory or by pattern, or the McCardells brought in a dressmaker twice a year to help make clothes. And McCardell was instantly interested, even from a very young age, of the act of making clothes. She was preternaturally drawn to it.
LIMBONG: That sounds very fancy, but I take it that's a fairly normal thing - right? - to have someone come and make your clothes for you.
DICKINSON: Absolutely. It's something that people in the middle class would often have someone help to make clothes 'cause again, you couldn't shop and get your clothes, you know, from a store at the time.
LIMBONG: You couldn't just hop on Amazon (laughter).
DICKINSON: Yes, exactly. There was no Amazon.
LIMBONG: Yeah, OK. A big theme of this book is how her clothes look on a hanger versus how they look on a person and that the fact that they didn't necessarily pop on the hanger meant it was a rough time for her to, like, get buy-in from gatekeepers, whether it be, like, her bosses or, like, buyers at fashion stores. What does that say about how people viewed women's fashion at the time, and how did she sort of overcome that hump?
DICKINSON: Her clothes didn't have what her male bosses called hanger appeal because up until that point, most clothes had been very structured. They had boning in the bodice or they had ways in which, when you put them on a hanger, they had some structure to them. But she was making comfortable clothes.
LIMBONG: That choice served McCardell well. Women were snatching up these designs to the point where she was competing with the likes of the big Parisian labels. And her biggest rival at the time - the Apollo Creed to her Rocky Balboa - the designer Christian Dior.
DICKINSON: In my research on Claire, I found this amazing article called "The Gal Who Defied Dior," and it raised this question of, like, what? What was the defiance? What was the beef? Well, the work that Claire did to free women with these clothes that allowed them to move about the world - in 1947, the war ends, Christian Dior comes on the scene, and he creates something that was called the New Look. It included that classic '50s look that I think we all think of - the broad shoulders, the really tight, cinched waist, and the wide, full skirts. His desire was to, quote, "save women from nature," meaning he wanted to structure their body to the clothes.
McCardell always wanted to structure the clothes to a woman's life, and she was not happy about Dior trying to cinch women back into 18-inch waists. I mean, Dior's models were literally fainting at some of the fittings from how tight and restrictive the clothes were, and she really did not care for this regression of women being objects versus women being autonomous and independent purveyors of their own lives.
LIMBONG: That independent ethos led to a bigger transformation, the creation of the American fashion industry as we know it today.
This beef also encapsulated something, a broader theme in this book, which is America finding its own aesthetic identity - right? - because up until the war, fashion is essentially just, like, aping off of what they're doing in France, right? And then when the war happens, it would be like, oh, France is busy doing other stuff, and she's, you know, coming into her own as a designer. Can you talk a little bit about how we finally - if we finally - freed ourselves from the influence of France in our clothing?
DICKINSON: Yeah, so you have to remember when McCardell came to New York in the 1920s, there was no American fashion industry as we know it today. There was the garment district, and their job was to copy and steal designs from Paris. Paris was the fashion capital of the world, so much that even American consumers thought there's no such thing as American design. Claire McCardell and her colleagues, mostly women, pioneered the American look, which is what we all wear today - that's casual, comfortable sportswear - and they took Paris on, even before the war, as trying to become the style capital of the world.
When Paris shut down because of the Nazi occupation, they had this chance to basically grow the industry and to prove themselves, and McCardell thrived in that moment. But when Paris returned, they wanted to get their title back. And so there was this interesting battle between designers like McCardell and the haute couture designers of Paris. But interestingly, Christian Dior, who thought that McCardell was a genius designer, very quickly started to do ready-to-wear, and you start to see how McCardell's style and her business acumen began to influence the Parisian designers as well.
LIMBONG: OK, so McCardell revolutionizes women's fashion, helps develop the American fashion industry and even begins to influence other designers. So how come McCardell isn't a household name? Why isn't her jersey hanging in the rafters of the fashion gods, along with Coco Chanel, Pierre Cardin, Christian Dior?
DICKINSON: There's a couple of reasons for why we've lost Claire McCardell's name. One is she died young. She was 52 when she died. And while haute couture in Paris had a system for carrying on the name of a dead designer, as they did with Dior and Chanel, that really didn't exist in ready-to-wear in America yet. I think the other thing is, she was designing clothes for the everyday, and her work is so prevalent as to become invisible. We don't even see it anymore because she invented those everyday items that we continue to wear - ballet flats, mix-and-match separates, wrap dresses.
LIMBONG: And if you ask Dickinson where you can see McCardell's influence today, it's all around us, from women wearing sportswear in their day to day to famous people getting dressed up for a red carpet.
DICKINSON: I just saw Zendaya wearing a bubble dress, you know, not too long ago, and you can look back and see the exact same bubble dress idea from McCardell. There are so many of our clothes today that you can go back and do - we should do a comparison of then and now. Really, so much of her is in our DNA.
LIMBONG: Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson, thank you so much.
DICKINSON: Oh, my gosh. Thank you. It's been a pleasure.
LIMBONG: Her book "Claire McCardell: The Designer Who Set Women Free" is out now. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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