Instead of imitation, open-ended possibility: “If your mind is a squirrel-cage jammed with impressions you’ve picked up here and there, you are apt to come away with a headache and a bad purchase.” Instead of constant novelty, familiarity: “You must never look as if you were wearing a dress for the first time.” McCardell’s goal is the kind of physical confidence that an itchy collar, a tugging seam, or a faltering zipper will only undermine. Feel the material-is it soft, a pleasant surface to touch?” Everything about the shopping process that she envisions runs counter to the ethos that fast fashion inculcates. “Avoid the inexpensive dress that is made of hard unyielding fabric. . . . Even while bargain hunting, people should pay attention to their senses, she writes. The “number one rule” she offers shoppers is to “wear the fabric you feel best in”-a perfectly simple guiding principle that’s all too easy to forget for those of us clicking through online retail in search of something new for fall. She prefers costume jewelry to the real thing, never misses the chance to wear a long dress, and believes that coats should be fun and affordable rather than expensive and boring.
“I like hoods because I like my ears to be warm,” she notes at one point. The attitude toward fashion McCardell brings to the page is practical but also lively and personal. Interspersed through the pages are playfully loose sketches of silhouettes and accessories. In the book, she guides the reader through the process of assembling a wardrobe, in chapters that address such questions as “Where Do Fashion Trends Come From?” and “Is It the Fault of the Dress?” She starts from an assumption that fashion need not be exclusive, and urges readers to take an interest in it without taking it too seriously. Her emergence in the nineteen-thirties and forties helped bring about the beginning of homegrown U.S. McCardell, who grew up in Maryland, had studied fashion in Paris as an undergraduate at Parsons, but she came to eschew European influence-she was more interested in solving American women’s everyday style problems than in copying the French. She favored adaptable shapes and simple materials, such as wool jersey, even for formal occasions her innovations included ballet flats and skirts with zippers on the sides, for easy reach. McCardell was an American ready-to-wear designer known for pioneering women’s separates and sportswear. “I went to iron a ‘100% cotton’ shirt from Shein and it melted onto my iron.” These are garments whose physical reality is an afterthought.įast fashion has created a shopping landscape far removed from the one surveyed by Claire McCardell in her exuberant 1956 guide to getting dressed, “ What Shall I Wear?” The book has now been reissued (with a new introduction by Tory Burch) and fashion critics have praised McCardell’s enduring relevance-and, although much about the world of clothes has changed, her voice retains its jaunty authority.
“I'd be really careful,” one poster on the Shein subreddit warns another, who is contemplating ironing a new pair of pants.
Prices are dizzying- twelve dollars for a sweater dress, two dollars and twenty-five cents for a tube top, marked down-and the general consensus, even among Shein devotees, is that you get more or less what you pay for.
(Zara reportedly releases some ten thousand new products annually Shein has released that many in a day.) The business is built on data-driven manufacturing, and trends on TikTok, where “Shein haul” videos show shoppers emptying boxes in an avalanche of plastic-wrapped purchases. Probably no company has done so more adeptly than Shein, an online retailer operating at a scale and pace that makes the Zaras and H&Ms of the world look artisanal. Fast fashion-with its promise of endlessly replaceable visual variety-is an industry built to take advantage of this shift in priorities. But, about “Project Runway,” I think he may have been onto something.Ĭlothes have always been designed to be seen, of course, but, with fashion increasingly browsed, bought, shown off, and resold via screens, now less than ever do they exist to be felt. Strong aesthetic conviction is not always the most appealing quality in a nineteen-year-old. In college, I had a friend with strong aesthetic convictions, and often I find myself thinking about his opinion of “Project Runway.” We were at school in the heyday of Heidi Klum and (the man invariably introduced as) “top American designer Michael Kors.” This friend would join the group viewings that took place on a grubby dorm-room couch, but he would express the belief that the show was fundamentally bogus because no one got to feel the clothes.
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