Claire McCardell hated being uncomfortable. This was true long before she became one of America’s most famous fashion designers in the 1950s, her influence felt in every woman’s wardrobe, her face on the cover of Time magazine.
克莱尔·麦卡德尔（Claire McCardell）讨厌不舒服。在她成为1950年代美国最著名的时装设计师之一之前，这是事实，她的影响力在每个女人的衣柜里，她在《时代》杂志的封面上。
As a young girl growing up in Maryland, she hated wearing a dress when climbing trees, and didn’t understand why she couldn’t wear pants with pockets like her brothers—she had nowhere to put the apples she picked. At summer camp, she loathed swimming in the cumbersome full-length stockings women were expected to wear, so she ditched hers and went bare-legged in the lake, even though she knew she’d get in trouble. When she was just starting out as a fashion designer, in the 1930s, she went on a ski trip to New Hampshire and one evening saw a woman shivering in a thin satin dress. Why, McCardell wondered, couldn’t an evening gown be made out of something warmer, so a woman could actually enjoy herself?
作为一个在马里兰州长大的年轻女孩，她讨厌爬树时穿一件衣服，并且不明白为什么她不能像兄弟一样穿着口袋的裤子 - 她无处可供选择的苹果。在夏令营中，她讨厌在繁琐的全长长筒袜中游泳的女性会穿着，所以她抛弃了她的她，在湖中裸露了腿，即使她知道自己会遇到麻烦。当她刚开始担任时装设计师时，在1930年代，她去了新罕布什尔州的滑雪旅行，一个晚上，一个女人穿着薄薄的缎面连衣裙发抖。麦卡德尔（McCardell）想知道，为什么不能用温暖的东西制成晚礼服，以便女人实际上可以享受自己呢？
McCardell made a career out of asking such questions, and helped transform American fashion in the process, as Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson details in her lively and psychologically astute biography, Claire McCardell: The Designer Who Set Women Free. The young designer who came home from New Hampshire and devised a blue wool evening dress was often dismissed by her bosses for her “crazy” ideas—wool was for coats, not parties! She was told to keep copying the latest looks from Paris, as was customary in the American garment trade at the time. In those early years, McCardell didn’t have the clout to design apparel her way. But she had a core conviction, and she never abandoned it: Women deserve to be comfortable—in their clothes, and in the world.
麦卡德尔（McCardell）提出这样的问题的职业生涯，并在此过程中帮助改变了美国时尚，因为伊丽莎白·埃维特（Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson）在她活泼而心理敏锐的传记《克莱尔·麦卡德尔（Claire McCardell）：使女性免费的设计师》中的细节中进行了细节。这位年轻的设计师从新罕布什尔州回家，设计了一件蓝色的羊毛晚礼服，她的老板通常因“疯狂”的想法而被解雇 - 沃尔是为了外套，而不是派对！她被告知要继续复制巴黎的最新外观，当时的美国服装贸易中的习惯也是如此。在那些早年，麦卡德尔没有自己的方式设计服装。但是她有一个核心的信念，她从未放弃过：女人应该在衣服和世界上感到舒适。
Almost a century later, “we owe much of what hangs in our closets to Claire McCardell,” Dickinson writes, and yet she is not among the fashion figures “we all remember.” That’s an understatement. How is it that McCardell, once a household name, is now known only to fashion cognoscenti and costume historians? Dickinson offers a portrait of a revolutionary, if a private and pragmatic one, and examining McCardell’s story helps expand our sense of what revolution can look like.
大约一个世纪后，迪金森写道：“我们欠克莱尔·麦卡德尔（Claire McCardell）的壁橱里的大部分东西，但她并不是时尚人物“我们都记得”。这是轻描淡写的。麦卡德尔（McCardell）曾经是家喻户晓的名字，现在只对时尚的认知和服装史学家知道？狄金森（Dickinson）提供了革命性的肖像，即私人且务实的肖像，并研究麦卡德尔（McCardell）的故事有助于扩大我们对革命外观的感觉。
A glance at a list of McCardell’s innovations provides a crash course in just how limited—and limiting—fashion options once were for American women. McCardell insisted on putting pockets in women’s clothing; previously, pockets were reserved almost exclusively for men. (McCardell knew that pockets were good for more than holding things—they could help, she once wrote, if you were “standing in front of your boss’s desk trying to look casual and composed.”) She put fasteners on the side of her clothes rather than the back, so women could get dressed without a husband or a maid. She partnered with Capezio to popularize the ballet flat—and the idea that women didn’t always have to wear heels. When air travel became possible, and steamer trunks were replaced with slim suitcases, McCardell developed separates: tops and bottoms you could mix and match so that you didn’t have to bring a bulky parade of dresses for every occasion. She patented the wrap dress, mainstreamed the leotard, stripped linings out of swimsuits so that women didn’t have to sit sodden and cold on the beach. Ever worn denim? McCardell is the one who ignored its provenance as a humble workingman’s textile and brought it to women’s wear.
一瞥麦卡德尔的创新列表提供了一个速成课程，这是对美国女性的有限和限制时尚选择的程度。麦卡德尔坚持要穿上女士服装的口袋；以前，口袋几乎全部保留给男性。（McCardell知道口袋比拿着东西还不错 - 如果您“站在老板的桌子前，试图看起来很随意并组成。”）她将紧固件放在衣服的侧面而不是背部，所以女人可以穿着丈夫或女仆的衣服。她与卡普齐奥（Capezio）合作，普及了芭蕾舞平坦，这一想法是女性并不总是穿高跟鞋。当可能的航空旅行成为可能，而蒸笼后备箱被纤细的行李箱取代时，McCardell就会开发出分离：您可以混合和搭配的顶部和底部，因此您不必为每种场合带来笨重的礼服。她为裹身连衣裙申请了专利，主流的紧身连衣裤，从泳衣上脱下了衬里，以使妇女不必在海滩上坐着湿透。曾经穿过牛仔布吗？麦卡德尔（McCardell）是那个忽略其作为谦虚的工人纺织品并将其带入女性服装的人。
These ideas won McCardell early acclaim and autonomy, and though she died young (in her early 50s, of colon cancer, in 1958), she was a dominant force in American fashion for nearly 20 years. At 27, she earned the title of head designer at Townley Frocks; at 35, she negotiated to get her name on the label. She was free to unleash her most unorthodox ideas (one boss called them crazy so many times that she began wryly referring to her favorite concepts as “my crazies”). And because they were in fact quite sensible, many of them were commercial hits. She was hailed not just as a progenitor of the “American Look” but as an arbiter of American preferences: By the 1950s, she was regularly enlisted to endorse a wide spectrum of products, including playing cards, hair dye—even bourbon. When McCardell died, her New York Times obituary ran on the front page.
这些想法赢得了麦卡德尔的早期好评和自治，尽管她年轻时去世（在她50多岁的结肠癌中，1958年），她在美国时尚持续了近20年。27岁时，她在Townley Farocks获得了校长的头衔。35岁时，她谈判在标签上获得名字。她可以自由释放她最非正统的想法（一位老板称他们为疯狂多次，以至于她开始苦苦地将自己喜欢的概念称为“我的疯狂”）。而且由于它们实际上很明智，所以许多人都是商业热门歌曲。她不仅被称为“美国外观”的祖先，而且被称为美国偏好的仲裁者：到1950年代，她经常被邀请认可各种产品，包括扑克牌，毛发，染发，甚至是波旁威士忌。当麦卡德尔去世时，她的《纽约时报》 itu告在头版上运行。
McCardell at work in 1940 (Bettmann / Getty)
麦卡德尔（McCardell）在1940年上班（贝特曼 /盖蒂）
From her birth, in Frederick, Maryland, in 1905, she didn’t lack for life’s comforts, financial or otherwise, and was given unusual opportunities, as Dickinson’s thoroughly researched account makes clear. McCardell’s family was prosperous; her grandfather ran a candy business, her father was a banker, and her mother could afford regular trips to the local general store for fabric and seasonal visits from a seamstress who let a curious young McCardell watch every stitch she made. Fortunately, her parents believed in education for women, and they eventually agreed to supplement her stint at nearby Hood College, where she reluctantly studied home economics: In 1925, she enrolled at the New York School of Fine and Applied Art (which later became the Parsons School of Design) and headed off to study clothing illustration in New York and Paris.
从她的出生到1905年，她在马里兰州的弗雷德里克（Frederick），她并没有缺乏人生的舒适感，而是经济或其他方式，因此得到了不寻常的机会，正如狄金森（Dickinson）的彻底研究的帐户所表明的那样。麦卡德尔的家人很繁荣。她的祖父经营着一家糖果业务，父亲是银行家，她的母亲可以负担得起当地综合商店的定期旅行，从一位裁缝中进行织物和季节性访问，裁缝让一个好奇的年轻麦卡德尔（McCardell）手表她制作的每一个缝制。幸运的是，她的父母相信女性的教育，他们最终同意补充她在附近的胡德学院的任期，在那里她勉强学习了家庭经济学：1925年，她在纽约善良和应用艺术学院招收（后来成为帕森斯设计学院），并前往纽约和巴黎的学习服装插图。
What stands out in Dickinson’s account is McCardell’s clarity of vision, even early on. When her angora sweater left squiggles of lint on her high-school date’s suit, she made note: Good clothes shouldn’t create nagging little embarrassments. When she was studying in Paris and got possession of a discounted dress by the couturier Madeleine Vionnet, she immediately “took a seam ripper to it,” Dickinson writes, dismantling the precious garment so that she could understand it better, then sewing it together again. When she was back in New York, McCardell, lanky and confident, found work as a model at B. Altman, showcasing dresses on the shop floor. She ditched the prim and regal posture common at the time and walked instead with a casual, loping slouch that made each outfit look easy and appealing. Shoppers bought what she wore. (McCardell is still sometimes credited as the originator of the way models walk today.)
迪金森（Dickinson）的帐户中脱颖而出的是麦卡德尔（McCardell）的远见清晰度，甚至很早。当她的Angora毛衣在高中日期的西装上留下了一块棉绒时，她便注意：好衣服不应该造成一些麻烦的尴尬。狄金森写道，当她在巴黎学习并拥有甲壳虫玛德琳·维昂内特（Madeleine Vionnet）的折扣连衣裙时，她立即“拿起了缝的开膛手”。当她回到纽约时，麦卡德尔（McCardell）瘦高而自信，在B. Altman的模特中找到了工作，在商店地板上展示了礼服。她当时抛弃了普遍的原始姿势，并带着休闲，宽松的懒惰行走，使每件衣服看起来都很容易且吸引人。购物者买了她所穿的衣服。（McCardell有时仍然被认为是今天模特走路的发起人。）
McCardell never approved of the then-prevailing practice of copying French designs. In the early 20th century, French designers would release new looks each season, and American merchandisers would either purchase originals to imitate, license designs they were allowed to copy, or (more often) send young women to sketch and steal the French ideas, whether from seasonal shows in Paris or from American department stores. For McCardell, the theft rankled. When one of her first bosses sent her to surreptitiously sketch French designs at Bergdorf Goodman, she snuck out to a Central Park bench to draw from her imagination instead.
McCardell从未批准复制法语设计的预防实践。在20世纪初，法国设计师每个季节都会发布新的外观，而美国的销售商要么购买以模仿的原件，允许他们复制的许可设计，要么（更经常地）派遣年轻女性素描和窃取法国想法，无论是在巴黎的季节性演出中还是来自美国百货商店。对于麦卡德尔而言，盗窃案很烦恼。当她的第一位老板派她去伯格多夫·古德曼（Bergdorf Goodman）偷偷地绘制法国设计绘制法国设计时，她偷偷溜到中央公园的长凳上，从想象力中汲取了灵感。
She also saw that copying the French was producing a lot of bad clothes. French haute couture was custom-made, but by the 1920s, more and more American clothes were manufactured at scale and sold ready-to-wear. That meant fine French details—such as a carefully set shoulder or a delicate row of functional buttons—could be only clumsily reproduced. The effect was gawky at best, and it reinforced McCardell’s focus on developing a new fashion vernacular. The question was how to get her bosses to listen.
她还看到，复制法国人正在生产很多坏衣服。法国高级时装是定制的，但到1920年代，越来越多的美国服装是大规模制造的，并出售了成衣。这意味着法式细节（例如精心固定的肩膀或精致的功能性按钮）只能笨拙地再现。这种效果充其量是笨拙的，它加强了麦卡德尔致力于开发新的时尚白话。问题是如何让她的老板听。
In Dickinson’s telling, Dale Carnegie himself helped McCardell cultivate her powers of persuasion. McCardell first heard Carnegie’s self-improvement spiel at a gathering of the Fashion Group, a trade association for women in the industry, and then signed up for courses at his Institute of Effective Speaking. Just after these lessons, in 1938, she scored her first big win. (Dickinson can’t resist extracting perhaps too-tidy significance from other encounters with 20th-century heroes as well: When McCardell watches Charles Lindbergh’s plane land in Paris after his pioneering transatlantic flight, for example, she finds her faith in American pluck and ingenuity buoyed.)
在狄金森的讲述中，戴尔·卡内基本人帮助麦卡德尔培养了她的说服力。麦卡德尔（McCardell）首先在时装群集会上听到了卡内基（Carnegie）的自我完善史上，该组织是该行业妇女的贸易协会，然后在他的有效讲话学院签署了课程。在这些课后，在1938年，她获得了她的第一个大胜利。（狄金森无法抗拒与20世纪英雄的其他相遇中提取的意义太大：当麦卡德尔在开创性的跨大西洋飞行之后，当麦卡德尔看着查尔斯·林德伯格在巴黎的飞机土地时，她发现她对美国的普拉克和创造力的信心，并浮出水面。）
Carnegie-inspired or not, McCardell’s first triumph came when she was lead designer at Townley, constantly battling pushback from her boss there, Henry Geiss. He fought her on pockets. When she declined to include shoulder pads, the French vogue, he had the workroom tuck them in later. Her newest idea: a voluminous dress, narrow at the shoulders and wide at the hem, simple to cut and easy to manufacture, that could be belted in a number of ways and would be flattering to women of all shapes and sizes. When a woman wore it, she felt effortless, elegant, and free. On the hanger, though, it looked like a sack. Geiss said it would never sell and refused to include it in the line.
卡内基是否受到启发，麦卡德尔（McCardell）在汤利（Townley）担任首席设计师时，她的第一次胜利是在她的老板亨利·盖斯（Henry Geiss）的挑战中作战。他用口袋与她作战。当她拒绝包括法国Vogue的肩垫时，他将工作室塞进了后来。她的最新想法是一件巨大的连衣裙，肩膀狭窄，下摆宽，易于剪裁且易于制造，可能会以多种方式束缚，并且会对各种形状和尺寸的女性感到讨人喜欢。当女人穿着它时，她感到毫不费力，优雅和自由。但是，在衣架上，它看起来像个麻袋。盖斯说，它永远不会出售，也拒绝将其包括在生产线中。
And so, Dickinson recounts, on the day a buyer from Best & Co., a New York department store, was in the showroom, McCardell turned up in her own trapeze-style dress, cut in a rich red wool, and strode through bearing coffee as the buyer was packing up. “You didn’t show me that one,” the buyer from Best & Co. said, and ordered 100 on the spot. (Whether this encounter was coincidence or contrived is open to interpretation, and Dickinson acknowledges in a footnote that the tale has “several versions”; she relies on her archival work and the analysis of previous biographers to support the staged-coffee-run version of events.) However it was discovered, the dress, which became known as the “Monastic” because its loose cut recalled a monk’s robe, sold out in a day and became a national sensation. “Geiss is such a dope,” McCardell told her friends.
因此，狄金森（Dickinson）在纽约百货公司Best＆Co.的买家中讲述，麦卡德尔（McCardell）穿着她自己的飞人风格的连衣裙，穿着浓郁的红色羊毛，然后在买家收拾东西时穿上咖啡。Best＆Co。的买家说：“您没有向我展示那个。”（无论是偶然还是人为的相遇还是对解释开放，迪金森在脚注中承认这个故事有“多个版本”；她依靠她的档案工作以及对先前的传记作者的分析来支持上演的餐饮活动版本的事件。）然而，它被发现了“摩西派”，因为它被发现了一个杂乱无章的感觉。麦卡德尔告诉她的朋友们：“盖斯真是个浓汤。”
McCardell’s “Monastic” dress (Digital image © 2025 Museum Associates / LACMA. Licensed by Art Resource, NY.)
McCardell的“修道院”连衣裙（数字图像©2025 Museum Associates / Lacma。由纽约艺术资源许可。）
Soon after, Townley went out of business: Geiss had spent a year in combat with copycats rather than encouraging McCardell to come up with the next great idea. A year later, he revived the brand with a new partner, Adolph Klein, and asked McCardell to return. When she insisted on having her name on the label, and final say on the designs, Klein and Geiss agreed. The year was 1940. The Germans had invaded France, Parisian fashion had shut down, and manufacturers and merchandisers were wondering: Could America get dressed by itself?
不久之后，汤利（Townley）倒闭了：盖斯（Geiss）与模仿者一起度过了一年，而不是鼓励麦卡德尔（McCardell）提出下一个好主意。一年后，他与新的合作伙伴Adolph Klein一起恢复了品牌，并要求McCardell返回。当她坚持将自己的名字放在标签上，并在设计上最终决定时，克莱因和盖斯同意了。这一年是1940年。德国人入侵了法国，巴黎时尚关闭了，制造商和商人想知道：美国能打扮自己吗？
McCardell thrived because of her timing, and because her new partner, Klein, was a marketing whiz who knew how to sell her distinctive designs. It may have helped, too, that she waited until she was established to marry and never had children of her own. But she succeeded above all because she never stopped thinking about how her customers would feel in their clothes. “When you’re uncomfortable, you are likely to show it,” she told a radio interviewer in 1947. Clothes should be easy to wear, “so there is no temptation to be forever pulling, pinching, and adjusting them, which spoils your own fun and makes everyone else fidgety. You never look really well-dressed when you’re over-conscious of what you have on.”
麦卡德尔（McCardell）由于时间安排而蓬勃发展，因为她的新伙伴克莱因（Klein）是一个营销狂，她知道如何出售她独特的设计。她也等待着结婚，而且从未有过自己的孩子，这也可能有所帮助。但是她最重要的是，因为她从未停止过思考客户在衣服上的感觉。她告诉1947年的一位广播面试官。“当您不舒服时，您很可能会展示它。衣服应该很容易穿，因此“没有诱惑可以永远拉动，捏住和调整它们，这会使您自己的乐趣变得有趣，并使其他所有人都很烦躁。
Fashion historians tend to agree that McCardell had a distinctively elegant and inventive knack for bringing American women new freedom of movement. She rejected anything restricting—even when Christian Dior burst onto the French scene with his “New Look” after World War II and began trussing women back into corsets with 18-inch waists. Dior described women as flowers, to be admired and plucked. McCardell saw women as doers, and designed accordingly. She often used kimono or dolman sleeves, favoring the loose arm openings that allowed a woman to “raise her arm above her head to hold a strap on the subway or hail a taxi without worrying about ripping a seam,” as Dickinson writes. Her cuts were unusual and modern, which is why costume institutes prize her work and fashion instructors still pore over her techniques.
时尚历史学家倾向于同意，麦卡德尔（McCardell）有一种独特的优雅和创造性的诀窍，可以使美国妇女获得新的运动自由。她拒绝了任何限制的东西 - 即使克里斯蒂安·迪奥（Christian Dior）在第二次世界大战后他的“新外观”冲向法国舞台，并开始将妇女束缚在腰间18英寸的紧身胸衣中。迪奥将妇女描述为鲜花，被钦佩和拔出。麦卡德尔将妇女视为行动者，并因此而设计。正如狄金森（Dickinson）所写的那样，她经常使用和服或多尔曼袖子，偏爱松散的手臂开口，使妇女“将手臂抬高到她的头顶上，在地铁上握住皮带或冰雹出租车，而不必担心撕裂接缝”。她的削减是不寻常的，现代的，这就是为什么服装机构为她的工作和时尚教练奖励她的技巧的原因。
Whether McCardell was really “the designer who set women free” in a broader sense is a more complicated question. During McCardell’s lifetime, women certainly gained sartorial freedom: more casual and comfortable options; more economical ones; more revealing ones; and in general, more choice about how they might acceptably present themselves to the world. But McCardell was part of a cohort of American designers who helped invent American sportswear—casual clothes suited to Americans’ active lives. Dickinson carefully nods at this landscape, introducing us to other influential innovators in fashion such as the Lord & Taylor executive Dorothy Shaver, who featured female American designers’ lines in her store windows long before McCardell made her name. The 1955 Time cover story that featured McCardell cites a list of even more forgotten peers who were pushing fashion forward as well, none of whom gets more than scant mention in Dickinson’s account: Sydney Wragge, who is also sometimes credited with inventing modern separates; Clare Potter, who popularized two-piece swimsuits; Vera Maxwell, who also thought clothes should be comfortable; Carolyn Schnurer, who told The New York Times that pockets give women “something to do with their hands.”
在更广泛的意义上，麦卡德尔是否真的是“使女性自由的设计师”是否是一个更复杂的问题。在麦卡德尔（McCardell）的一生中，妇女无疑获得了服装自由：更随意，更舒适的选择；更经济的；更揭示的；总的来说，更多关于他们如何可以接受的选择。但是麦卡德尔（McCardell）是一群美国设计师队列的一部分，他们帮助发明了美国运动服（适合美国人的活跃生活）。狄金森（Dickinson）在这个风景中小心地点点头，向我们介绍了其他有影响力的创新者，例如Lord＆Taylor执行执行Dorothy Shaver，后者在McCardell早就出名之前就在她的商店Windows中以女性设计师的台词为特色。1955年的时代封面故事以麦卡德尔（McCardell）的名字列出了一个更被遗忘的同龄人的清单，他们也推动了时尚的前进，在狄金森（Dickinson）的帐户中，没有一个比少数提到的人：悉尼·瓦格（Sydney Wragge），他们有时也因发明现代分离而被认为也值得称赞；克莱尔·波特（Clare Potter）普及了两件式泳衣。维拉·麦克斯韦（Vera Maxwell），他也认为衣服应该舒适。卡罗琳·施纳尔（Carolyn Schnurer）告诉《纽约时报》，口袋给妇女“与他们的手有关”。
Perhaps McCardell is best thought of not as a singular visionary but as a leading voice in a chorus of designers, all responding to the growth of mass manufacturing; to the uniquely American assumption—both democratic and consumerist—that women up and down the income scale deserved to dress well; and to the huge opportunity presented when France went dark during the war. The changing lives of American women gave rise to the demand for these new clothes, and if McCardell had not existed, another talent would no doubt have seized the moment.
也许麦卡德尔最好地想到不是一个有远见的人，而是设计师合唱中的领导声音，都对大规模制造的增长做出了响应。对于美国独特的假设（无论是民主和消费者》中，妇女在收入规模上的上下都应该穿得很好。在战争期间法国漆黑时，巨大的机会。美国妇女的生活不断变化会引起对这些新衣服的需求，如果麦卡德尔不存在，毫无疑问，另一个才能就抓住了这一刻。
That doesn’t make her any less of a revolutionary, and she is semiregularly reexamined by the fashion world because her geometrically novel designs appeal to the eye in different eras. Three years ago, Tory Burch launched a collection inspired by McCardell and wrote the foreword to a rerelease of What Shall I Wear?, a fashion-advice book that McCardell published (and wrote at least some of) in 1956.
这并不能使她变得革命性，她被时尚界的半镜头重新审视，因为她的几何新颖的设计对不同时代的眼睛有吸引力。三年前，托里·伯奇（Tory Burch）推出了一个受麦卡德尔（McCardell）启发的系列，并将前言重新发布，以重新发布我要穿什么？，这是一本麦卡德尔（McCardell）在1956年出版（并至少写过）的时尚奖励书。
The real reason the larger world doesn’t know McCardell’s name is that, unlike her rival and contemporary Christian Dior, she did not designate a successor or make any plan for her line to continue after her death. Dior also died at 52, just a few months before McCardell, having appointed Yves Saint Laurent to carry on his work and safeguard his name. But it’s worth considering what a fashion legacy entails: Do we know Dior’s name because we understand his art? Or have we merely seen it on the side of sunglasses and in bus-shelter perfume ads?
更大的世界不知道麦卡德尔的名字的真正原因是，与竞争对手和当代的克里斯蒂安·迪奥（Christian Dior）不同，她没有指定继任者，也没有为自己的界限制定任何计划。迪奥（Dior）也在麦卡德尔（McCardell）任命伊夫·圣洛朗（Yves Saint Laurent）进行工作并维护他的名字的几个月前就去世了52岁。但是，值得考虑的是时尚遗产是什么：我们知道迪奥的名字是因为我们了解他的艺术吗？还是我们只是在太阳镜和公共汽车避开的香水广告的侧面看到它？
Perhaps fashion is better understood not as art, but as a form of industrial design. I don’t know the name of the man who invented the potato peeler, but I benefit from his efforts at least twice a week. McCardell fought for recognition in her lifetime, but she seemed to want it less for glory and more because it gave her the power to operate as she liked. She might take a look at our modern closets, our ballet flats and wrap dresses, separates and side zippers, and conclude that she did enough, whether we know her name or not.
也许时尚更好地理解为艺术，而是一种工业设计的一种形式。我不知道发明马铃薯果的人的名字，但我每周至少两次从他的努力中受益。麦卡德尔（McCardell）一生都为人们的认可而战，但她似乎希望少于荣耀，而更多的是因为它赋予了她按自己喜欢的人进行操作的能力。她可能会看一下我们的现代壁橱，我们的芭蕾舞平面和包裹连衣裙，分开和侧面拉链，并得出结论，她做得足够，无论我们是否知道她的名字。
But McCardell is worth remembering as an example of the persistence called for, in any field, to see the world as it is—and to fight for the world as it should be. In 2021, her hometown in Maryland installed a statue of her in a local park. She slouches in her signature posture, confident and at ease, leaning back against a dressmaker’s form. It’s striking to see an official statue that looks so relaxed; she’s not staring at the horizon as though meeting the queen, or setting the coordinates for an artillery attack. She looks, above all, comfortable.
但是，麦卡德尔值得记住，这是在任何领域都要求看到世界的持久性的一个例子，并为世界而战。2021年，她在马里兰州的家乡在当地的公园里安装了她的雕像。她以自信而放松的标志性姿势懒洋洋，向后靠在裁缝的形式上。看到一个看起来如此放松的官方雕像令人惊讶。她并没有盯着地平线，就好像与女王见面，或者为炮弹袭击而设置坐标。她看上去很舒服。
This article appears in the August 2025 print edition with the headline “It Has Pockets!”
本文出现在2025年8月的印刷版中，标题为“它有口袋！”
