Word: fashion
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...spent two years at Frederick's Hood College, then quit, over her father's objections, to switch to Manhattan's Parsons School of Design (where she now is a part-time consultant). She studied for a year in Paris, working part time as a tracer of fashion sketches, and learned "the way clothes worked, the way they felt, where they fastened." Back in New York, she got a job painting rosebuds on lampshades for a store, did some modeling at B. Altman, became a designer in a knit-goods company at $45 a week-and was fired...
...another $45 job as a model and sketcher for Townley Frocks, Inc., then owned by Henry H. Geiss, a harassed veteran of Seventh Avenue's fashion campaigns. A tragedy provided a break. Less than a month before the spring showing in 1931, Townley's designer drowned while swimming; it was up to Claire to turn out a collection. Says she: "I did what everybody else did in those days-copied Paris. The collection wasn't great, but it sold." Flushed with confidence, Designer McCardell began to experiment. But often her designs were too advanced for the market...
...Bias. In 1938, Claire had her first big success-and speeded up the trend to casual clothes-with her Monastic dress. Until then, American women had little choice of styles between a cotton house dress and an afternoon dress. The Monastic dress gave American fashion a new flexibility that it has never lost. Loose-hanging and cut on the bias,*it did not sell at first. Then a buyer from Manhattan's Best & Co. casually asked for a New York exclusive, and ordered 50 Monastics in wool and 50 in faille. Best's ran a full-page...
...success was due not only to Claire McCardell's talent but to her sharp eye for opportunity. When World War II closed down the Paris fashion market, one retailer said: "The American garment industry is now in a position to show whether it can make a silk dress or whether it will be a sow's ear." Designer McCardell made a silk dress with a special wartime twist-a long kitchen-dinner dress of tie silk, with apron to match, for women who were forced to be their own maids. When Harper's Bazaar asked...
...these designers are merely the vanguard of a fashion army that is still growing, and is only beginning to fill the American woman's demand for clothes for her casual way of life...