Last month at the CFDA Awards, the American fashion industry gave its top prizes to a new vanguard of designers, a post-pandemic cadre of immigrants and children of immigrants who are reshaping American style. Nancy MacDonell’s new book, Empresses of Seventh Avenue, tells the stories of a different era of American talents, the female dressmakers and designers of the World War II era, women like Elizabeth Hawes and Claire McCardell who rejected the hegemony of Paris haute couture in favor of a homegrown elegance, one that combined function and form in ways adapted to their contemporaries’ changing lives. MacDonell and I spoke about the connections between the two generations, what could be improved about fashion now, and the ingenious origin story of the little booties on her book’s cover.
My colleague Hamish Bowles received the Eleanor Lambert Award at the CFDA Awards. Lambert was the founder of the CFDA and you quote her in your book. She said: “you must always be alert and see things right in front of you that have not been done and should be done.” What are some examples of the subjects of your book, the designers Elizabeth Hawes and Claire McCardell, seizing the moment, seizing opportunity?
We can start with Elizabeth Hawes, because she was working before Claire McCardell was, although they’re almost the same age. Hawes saw that it was time for Americans to have their own legend. She moved to Paris to learn how to become a couturier. She believed in the French legend, but when she spent time working there, she realized that it was a complete sham, and that Americans needed to have their own legend. She went back to New York, she opened her house, and she did not copy Paris. At first she thought she would go back and she would get a job with Bergdorf Goodman or Henri Bendel, or something like that, and when they realized that she had no intention of copying Paris, they didn’t want to hire her. Still, she was the first American design star. She was in all these ads for cigarettes and alcohol and chewing gum, all kinds of things, and she became a household name in the 1930s. She believed in what she believed in. She liked a full skirt. She liked clothes that you could move in, whether that’s what was happening in Paris or not. But she was a made-to-order designer. Claire McCardell was a ready-to-wear designer. The question she asked herself was not, how can I make this like Paris?, but how can I make something that is missing in my wardrobe? So that was her starting point. She was a real problem-solving designer. That’s what drove her. And she also grew up with three brothers, and she never understood why her clothes were supposed to be really delicate and not get dirty. Why couldn’t women’s clothes be both tender and tough? She wanted to address that, and she was enormously successful at it, with the help of many other people.
What were some of the wardrobe problems that McCardell solved?
She really hated a dress that you had to fasten up the back. Said something like, you might live alone and like it, but you need to be able to dress yourself. You’re not going to have your husband or your ladies made there to zip you up. She didn’t like shoulder pads. She took those out because she liked the natural form. She didn’t like a lot of foundation garments. When her models came to work for her in the showroom, she had them throw away their bras and girdles. And she liked clothes that she would describe as ‘clothes that perform.’ She really liked, for example, these spaghetti ties. She liked them tied like right under the bust, but you could tie them lower, you could wrap them a few times around your torso. It was really a conversation between her and her customer, rather than her saying, ‘this is how my dress fits. This is how you need to wear it.’
Let’s think about the 2020s. Do you ever find yourself out shopping and think, you know what designers aren’t doing that I wish they were doing? Or do you hear your friends talk about that? When you go out shopping, what are you frustrated about?
Big picture—I wish designers would look away from their screens and focus on making fashion that really works for women, rather than for influencers and likes. The reason that American fashion was able to succeed at mid-century, as we’re talking about, is because it recognized what women needed from their clothes. I feel like there’s a lot of sameness, almost airlessness, right now. We’re either getting something that’s very pared down, and I don’t think many people naturally dress that way, in that very rigorous way, and it can be sometimes quite joyless. Or you get this boho chic extreme, like we’re seeing now with Chloé. And I don’t think that’s how most women want to dress either. I think they want something that’s easy but also satisfying, that you can have an emotional connection to.
Another interesting quote in your book comes from Elsa Schiaparelli, who said that all beautiful clothes are made by French couturiers, and all women want them. It’s basically a century later and that dichotomy still exists, the one that says that Paris is creative, and New York is pragmatic. And I guess it’s just surprising that, despite the fame of American designers, and the fact that everyone around the world knows Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein and, and, and, there is still this sense that New York is never as good as Paris. Do you agree?
The French legend is remarkably durable. It dates to Louis XIV, and it’s still around. Louis XIV had Jean-Baptiste Colbert, we have Bernard Arnault, they’re both promoting the supremacy of French taste, and we are stuck with this internalized inferiority complex hat says that Paris is better and Paris is the standard that everyone should compare themselves to, and as long as we believe that it will be true. It was Valerie Steele who said that Paris is like Tinker Bell. If everyone believes really hard that Paris is great, then Paris will continue to be great.
I would say Paris is not better. It’s different. And you know, historically, especially when you’re looking at a beautiful dress by Vionnet or Lanvin in a museum, it’s haute couture. It’s not like today, where Paris designers make very expensive clothes, but expensive clothes that anyone could buy. To buy an haute couture dress in those days, you had to be introduced to the couture house, you had to be accepted as one of the clients. If you were a couture client, you very likely had a ladies maid, a full time servant who lived with you, and whose sole purpose was to look after your clothes and do your hair. So it’s this very restrictive, exclusive system. American fashion is built on the idea of ready-to-wear, the idea that everyone should have access to beautiful clothes, what the New Yorker’s fashion critic Lois Long called the “American genius for mass production.” I think that’s an origin story that is very compelling and that more attention should be paid to. I mean, what system would you rather be part of?
Do you see parallels between what the Empresses were doing in the ’30s and ’40s, redefining the way women could dress with more ease, and what American fashion is doing now?
It’s a different story. Now we have plenty of ease. Maybe a better way of looking at it is that they were redefining what fashion could be. And I see that today in the way we have more diverse points of view that are being recognized in fashion, like Rachel Scott, like Willy Chavarria. They’re both referencing their heritage: her Jamaican heritage, his Latino background, and they both got CFDA Awards. I think that shows that there’s a hunger for this kind of fashion. It’s not that different from what was happening during World War II, when, you know, for centuries, Paris has been considered the world capital of fashion. There was no second city. New York was a manufacturing center. That this idea was turned on its head in just four years is remarkable. What the Empresses did was really audacious, and they did it by leaning into what made American fashion and American culture unique. When Virginia Pope of the New York Times wanted to introduce some showmanship into New York Fashion presentations, she didn’t try to make them like a short fashion show, she leaned into the idiom of the Broadway show, you know, something very American. That’s how she did it. I think that lesson still applies.
You could say that Hawes and McCardell were responsible for one of fashion’s major all-time vibe shifts. Where do you think the next one could come from?
For something similar today, maybe we need to recognize designers from the Global South. You know, fashion has had this very Western influence, the Western focus, for centuries. That’s not where population growth is. So, you know, maybe it would be a vibe change to consider a designer from, say, sub-Saharan Africa with the same respect as one from New York or Paris would get and see what their ideas are about what we should wear.
Talk a little bit about researching and writing the book.
I teach at FIT, so I have access to a lot of FIT’s databases: the WWD archive, the Vogue archive, the Bazaar archive. It was really immersing myself in those primary sources. I think I read every issue of WWD from 1930 to 1949 and it was fascinating. I could do that stuff forever, reading old issues of Vogue and old issues of Bazaar and seeing what was important to them and who was highlighted. The September 1940 issues are the first ones that have only American fashion. Before that, the focus on Paris was really astonishing. When you read the old WWDs, you can feel the panic coming off the page—this real fear that in September, women wouldn’t buy anything because it didn’t have that stamp of Paris, which sounds crazy to us now, but it was a real concern.
Like almost everything in life, these women’s successes were about timing, right? Hawes and McCardell saw their opening, and they really took it. Let’s play the game of who would play these women if the story made it to the screen.
I would love to see the Empresses on the small screen. If you saw The New Look [the Apple TV show about Christian Dior and his Paris contemporaries], this is what was happening in New York at the same time. It’s filled with roles for actresses in their 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s. And it’s not about them and the men in their lives. It’s about their work, which they really value. I would love to see Jamie Lee Curtis as Edna Woolman Chase, the editor of Vogue, digging into her roughness and the devastating put-downs she had for her staff. I saw a photo of Leslie Mandel recently, and she looks a bit like Carmel Snow, the editor of Harper’s Bazaar. Obviously, a huge role would be Eleanor Lambert. Reese Witherspoon might work. Diana Vreeland, that’s another huge role. Aubrey Plaza? Then Elizabeth Hawes, that’s a great character as well for a dark haired actress. Maybe Maggie Gyllenhaal? Then I thought Kirsten Dunst could be the photographer Louise Dahl Wolf. I could see her playing that role. Clara McCardelle was this all-American, tall, rangy, blue-eyed blonde. She’s a redhead, but maybe Jessica Chastain or maybe Amy Adams, another redhead?
What kind of responses have you heard from your readers?
One person asked me, and I kind of took this as a backhanded compliment… Some said, ‘why did they use the contemporary image on the cover?’ You know, this photo appeared in the January 1, 1950 issue of Vogue. It’s clothes that were made in the early 1940s. I think it’s interesting that someone thought they were contemporary clothes.
I had that same thought earlier this week. I thought to myself, this looks so modern, it’s crazy.
It’s basically leggings and a leotard and a little dress over it. These flat booties. If the hair and the makeup were different, absolutely you could wear these today. And the handbags, I love those handbags. They’re actually by an American brand called Phelps. They were based in Washington Square, and they used all of these antique military insignia on their bags. Someone should revive Phelps.
Maybe me?
They were great. It was a husband and wife team. And they first had this little workshop on Washington Square. They ended up moving to like Philly or something, with a bigger factory. It was very much in line with Claire McCardell, very American, nothing Parisian.
The model on the right… her flat boots, it really runs contrary to what we think, that women of the 1950s were always in a little pump or something.
Yeah, the Betty Grable/Ginger Rogers paradigm, as I called it. No, there are these flat little boots that Claire McCardell made with Capezio. Because shoes were the only item of clothing that were rationed in the US during the war. But there was this weird loophole for ballet slippers, which McCardell realized. And she went to Capezio—which, at the time, just made ballet slippers, they didn t make shoes—and she partnered with them, and they made built-up ballet slippers that you could wear on the street that matched her shoes. That is really ingenious. She saw a loophole and she exploited it.
