A Hero’s Journey, with Pockets: Claire McCardell, by Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson
by Seth Sawyers
I picked up a biography about a woman I’d never heard of who practiced a form of art I don’t often think about, and I couldn’t put it down.
Such is the storytelling ability of Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson in her super-readable biography of midcentury fashion designer Claire McCardell. Though the book’s subtitle tells us McCardell becomes the “designer who sets women free,” Evitts Dickinson has structured her biography so that triumph never feels assured. The result is a book that compels.
We’re told a version of the hero’s journey story. In the early 1920s, McCardell, a talented but academically disinterested young woman from Frederick, leaves for New York. There, she encounters a thousand obstacles, gets knocked back, ultimately succeeds, only to be largely forgotten after her early death at the age of 52. It’s those obstacles—less-talented business partners, prejudice toward dresses containing pockets, Christian Dior, and, above all else, a business world hostile to successful women—met with McCardell’s talent and drive that make this the kind of satisfying story in which the hero conquers after having risen from little.
Beyond only recounting the stones thrown and the stones dodged, Evitts Dickinson writes with such seeming ease, such richness of 1920s Paris or wartime New York or McCardell’s New Jersey country house, that the pages fly by. It all goes down so easy, the feel of the linen, the chill of the transatlantic voyage, the warmth of the weekend stews she’d make, that you forget you’re reading a biography. It feels like you’re reading a story.
It’s a sewing machine of a biography. You’re the fabric, pulled along. It’s a book that leaves a mark. Even if you’re like me, who hasn’t thought much about fashion, you’ll not again look at something on a hanger without thinking about how it came to be or how it, as McCardell so often thought about, might make a body feel.