Claire McCardell

Unwilling to send a teenager so far away, McCardell's father convinced her to enroll in the home economics program at Hood College instead.

[2] In Paris, McCardell and her classmates were able to purchase samples by couturiers such as Madeleine Vionnet that they took apart in order to study their structure.

[6] After graduation, she worked odd jobs sketching at a fashionable dress shop,[2] painting flowers on paper lamp shades, and acting as a fit model for B. Altman.

During the 1930s, she began to show innovations such as sashes, spaghetti string ties, and the use of menswear details that would become part of her design signature.

[6] In 1940, just before leaving Carnegie, McCardell attended her last Parisian fashion show, preferring from then on to avoid any French influence on her clothing.

The company's labels then read, "Claire McCardell Clothes by Townley", making her one of the first American designers to have name recognition.

[2][6][9] Although many designers considered them too basic, McCardell already worked with fabrics such as denim, calico, and wool jersey that were easily available during the war.

[12] When the government announced a surplus of weather balloon cotton materials in 1944, McCardell quickly bought them up, using them to design clothes that patriotic American women wore with pride.

[10] The "Popover Dress" received a citation from the American Fashion Critics Association and in 1943, McCardell won a Coty Award.

[3] In April 1953, the Frank Perls Gallery in Beverly Hills launched a retrospective exhibition of twenty years of McCardell's garments.

[17] The exhibit included the "Monastic Dress", the "Diaper Bathing Suit", Capezio ballet flats, and work-wear-inspired pieces with rivets.

[18] In his introduction to the exhibit, retailer Stanley Marcus wrote, "...she is one of the truly creative designers this country has produced... She is to America what Vionnet was to France.

In 1943, McCardell married the Texas-born architect, Irving Drought Harris, who had two children by an earlier marriage,[4][6] and established a home base in Manhattan, New York City.

[2] In 1998, forty years after her death, three separate retrospectives of Claire McCardell's work were staged at Metropolitan Museum of Art, F.I.T., and the Maryland Historical Society in Baltimore.

[11] Fashion designers such as Isaac Mizrahi, Donna Karan, Calvin Klein, Norma Kamali, and Cynthia Rowley all have been influenced by McCardell.

The club commissioned award-winning sculptor Sarah Hempel Irani for this monumental task and, thanks to community support, reached its fundraising goal in less than two years.

In October 2021, the statue will be placed on a granite pedestal in an elegant garden setting in Frederick's Carroll Creek Park.