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Jonathan Emmesedi @[email protected] · 2026-06-07 · 21:28 UTC

https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Claire-McCardell/Elizabeth-Evitts-Dickinson/9781668045237

An interesting read, but Dickinson's fixation on McCardell as a heroine leads her to overemphasize her individual achievement; the reader might easily come away with the mistaken impression that women are indebted solely to McCardell for sportswear, zip fastenings, and functional pockets.

To contrast with her heroine, the author has as villain Christian Dior. The "New Look" is presented as nothing but a retrograde styling for female submissiveness. Almost entirely absent from Dickinson's assessment of the "New Look" versus the "American Look" is any recognition of how dress might express pleasure in the fantastic, not just desire but the desire to be desired, and a host of other feelings not easily accommodated within the bounds of liberal individualism and the promotion of the function and ease as paramount. So these possibilities, as well as a reactionary return to female domesticity and a general fatigue with wartime "utility", might explain the popularity of New Look inspired clothing in the postwar era; the New Look's appeal was complex, and should not be simply dismissed as a case of false consciousness.

The hostile portrayal of Dior fits with a US nationalism that characterizes the book as a whole. The author resents what she sees as the failure of New York to replace Paris as the pole of postwar fashion and deplores what she sees as the lack of attention accorded to McCardell and other American women designers of the thirties and forties. Her book is an attempt to remedy this neglect and proclaim McCardell's importance as a major figure in the history of feminism, a distinctly American feminism bound up with individualist deals of autonomy, business success, and Dale Carnegie style refashioning of the self. This national - ideological orientation is in turn linked with a long US tradition of contrasting American "republican" simplicity and practicality in design with the "aristocratic" excess of Europe, to be found at its worst in French luxury.

Nevertheless, the book is worth reading if one is interested in 20th century US history or in fashion history. There's nowhere better to learn about the origins of the "Monastic" dress!

#ClaireMcCardell #FashionHistory #HistoryOfDress #History #USHistory #20thCenturyHistory #AmericanLook #NewLook