Tory Burch and Sarah Hoover Celebrated American Fashion Icon Claire McCardell

What does one wear to a launch party for a book titled What Shall I Wear? Why, Tory Burch, of course—unless you can get your hands on some Claire McCardell.

Published in 1956 by revolutionary American designer Claire McCardell, What Shall I Wear? was a 1950s guide to stylish dressing. Fast forward to 2022, McCardell served as the muse for Tory Burch’s spring 2023 collection. To celebrate the collection and bring McCardell back into the American vernacular, Burch collaborated with publisher Abrams Image to republish and update the book. For the 2022 edition, Burch wrote a foreword where she described her renewed fascination with McCardell’s oeuvre and an initiative at the Maryland Center for History and Culture to create a Claire McCardell exhibit. She writes, “What’s amazing to me is how her clothes let women feel unencumbered–elegant, yet at ease as they moved through their busy days.”

Claire McCardell is not a household name today, but she was in the mid-twentieth century. She is credited with fashion innovations that were radical for her time, including dresses with pockets and zippers, ballet flats, wrap dresses, and spaghetti straps. A Parson graduate who was championed by Vogue’s Diana Vreeland, McCardell was inspired by American streetwear. She created garments that were inherently political, fearless, and feminist. It was common in the 1940s and 1950s for American women to wear her ready-to-wear designs, including skirts made from surplus weather balloons and adjustable zipper dresses. “Women have been forgotten in history. Claire McCardell is a very important example of that… She was fearless. She was confident. She was radical. She was breaking the norm. She changed the way we dress today,” explained Burch at the book premiere. “One thing I loved about Claire is that she always said dress for yourself. Don’t dress for your husband.”

To celebrate the republishing of What Shall I Wear?, Tory Burch hosted a cocktail party and art history dialogue at her SoHo boutique with writer and art historian Sarah Hoover. The reception was on the ground floor of the Tory Burch Mercer street store, where guests sipped cocktails surrounded by Tory Burch accessories. Among those in attendance were Emily Ratajkowski, Huma Abedin, Paul Arnhold, Isolde Brielmaier, and Stefano Tonchi. Ratajkowski, who just walked in Burch’s New York fashion show last month, wore a look straight off the runway, as did Burch. Sarah Hoover, who also wore a McCardell-inspired Tory Burch design, spoke to Vogue about her personal dressing advice. “Have fun. Refuse to comply with societal conventions so that you can make room for others. Live your truth through your clothing.”

Later in the evening, fashionable attendees made their way upstairs for a moving conversation between Burch and Hoover. Advancing beyond the daily dressing ideas that McCardell wrote in her book, the evening’s topics ranged from feminism to motherhood to rewriting colonialist patriarchal history to comparisons drawn between McCardell and painter Alice Neel. Like Claire McCardell’s 1950s designs, the takeaways from the conversation were timeless and anything but old-fashioned.