Claire McCardell
The Designer Who Set Women Free
- Auteur: Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson (Verenigde Staten)
- Soort boek: biografie, modeboek
- Taal: Engels
- Uitgever: Simon & Schuster
- Verschijnt: 17 juni 2025
- Omvang: 336 pagina’s
- Uitgave: gebonden boek / ebook / luisterboek
- Prijs: $ 29,99 / $ 14,99 / $ 25,99
- Boek bestellen bij: Amazon / Bol / Libris
Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson Claire McCardell biografie recensie en review
- “Claire McCardell tossed out the corsets and crinolines and changed the way women dress. This icon of mid-century modernism was the anti-Dior, and her life is a unique American drama of design, business, and sheer nerve. Today, her influence is so pervasive that we hardly see it.” (Ellen Lupton, curator emerita, Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum)
- “This is a timely and important book, a testimony to a powerful woman whose legacy might be lost if not for the prodigious scholarship of Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson. It’s also just a darn good read.” (Laura Lippman)
Flaptekst van de biografie van modeontwerper Claire McCardell
The riveting hidden history of Claire McCardell, the most influential fashion designer you’ve never heard of.
Claire McCardell forever changed fashion—and most importantly, the lives of women. She shattered cultural norms around women’s clothes, and today much of what we wear traces back to her ingenious, rebellious mind. McCardell invented ballet flats and mix-and-match separates, and she introduced wrap dresses, hoodies, leggings, denim, and more into womenswear. She tossed out corsets in favor of a comfortably elegant look and insisted on pockets, even as male designers didn’t see a need for them. She made zippers easy to reach because a woman “may live alone and like it,” McCardell once wrote, “but you may regret it if you wrench your arm trying to zip a back zipper into place.”
After World War II, McCardell fought the severe, hyper-feminized silhouette championed by male designers, like Christian Dior. Dior claimed that he wanted to “save women from nature.” McCardell, by contrast, wanted to set women free. Claire McCardell became, as the young journalist Betty Friedan called her in 1955, “The Gal Who Defied Dior.”
Filled with personal drama and industry secrets, this story reveals how Claire McCardell built an empire at a time when women rarely made the upper echelons of business. At its core, hers is a story about our right to choose how we dress—and our right to choose how we live.
Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson is an award-winning journalist and author whose writing has been widely published in The New York Times, Harper’s, The New Yorker, The Southern Review, and The Washington Post Magazine, among many others. A National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellow, Dickinson’s work has earned recognition in anthologies such as The Best American Essays and been awarded Maryland’s prestigious Mary Sawyers Imboden Prize for literature. Dickinson lives in Baltimore with her husband and daughter.