Making getting dressed easy again
Claire McCardell, the midcentury designer who is one of the founding mothers of American sportswear, did many things first.
She was the first designer to put pockets in a dress that wasn’t for housecleaning. The first to embrace the capsule wardrobe, to use gingham for eveningwear and denim for day dresses, to popularize the ballet flat, to put her name on her label.
And she was one of the first to put her philosophy of dress down on paper, offering up what may still be the best how-to book on navigating a wardrobe that has been written.
Titled “What Shall I Wear?” and originally published in 1956, the slim volume has now been reissued in a new edition by Abrams with a foreword by Tory Burch, who has made it her mission to give McCardell’s name the same status as Saint Laurent in the popular imagination. (Burch has also created a fellowship dedicated to McCardell’s work at the Maryland Center for History and Culture in Baltimore, where the McCardell archive resides.)
And though McCardell’s work is also having something of a moment thanks to the Metropolitan Museum’s current American fashion extravaganza, which highlights often overlooked but important American designers (mostly women and designers of color), the book offers proof of concept in an entirely more accessible, contemporary kind of a way.
Indeed, in an era that
has seen a proliferation of branded glossy coffeetable tomes, not to mention endless dress advice from influencers on TikTok and YouTube, it may prove the essential text for anyone struggling with the basic question of what to wear.
That’s not just because much of the advice within is witty, though it is, or because there are practical suggestions for how to shop and pointed meditations on the importance of comfortable shoes and investment dressing. But because McCardell focuses on prioritizing the individual, rather than the industry. Also, she’s as good at aphorisms as Diana Vreeland, fashion’s most famous deliverer of one-liners, though McCardell’s have more functional application.
Consider, for example, a few choice excerpts: “If fashion seems to be saying something that isn’t right for you, ignore it.” “If you are smart you will forget labels and look for fine lines.” “Your job is not so much tracking down the clothes as tracking down yourself.”
McCardell didn’t drink the Champagne of fashion; she remixed it. It’s this attitude that comes through in her book — and it was in her clothes. That, as much as anything, was integral in defining the difference between American style, with its emphasis on utility and ease, and the more top-down, dictatorial European style. And that still resonates today.
As McCardell wrote, “I prefer to think of sports clothes as uninfluenced by Paris — clothes that wield their own influence.” Clothes that were influencers, in other words, before influencers.
The only time the text seems arcane is when it gets mired in the gender politics of its era. These days, “You will be in the spotlight at eight o’clock when you drive your husband to the train and go on to do the marketing,” can be a little hard to swallow.
In a new afterword to the book, Allison Tolman, vice president for collections and interpretation for the Maryland center, posits that the wifey asides were the work of Edith Heal, McCardell’s ghostwriter, trying to filter the designer’s palpably independent leanings through a more broadly palatable 1950s lens. Either way, it’s not enough to detract from the charm and currency of McCardell’s book.
Besides, “What Shall I Wear?” is, it turns out, part of another fashion trend, one in which designers are becoming vocal book boosters themselves.
There’s something about a book’s materiality and authorial style that finds common cause with the catwalk. If in doubt, simply spend some time with McCardell, whose advice accessorizes the mind, not just the house — and costs less these days than the price of a tube of haute lipstick.*