Elizabeth Evitz Dickinson

People were getting hurt.

Another thing that irritated her so much about Dior is you had to like get help to get dressed because...

There are all these little tiny buttons up the back.

She's like, oh, we're going back.

We're going back to this time where a woman is supposed to be trussed up and put on display.

And Claire didn't see it as a new look.

She saw it as a regression.

She got branded the gal who defied Dior in this article written by a young Betty Friedan.

And Betty was noticing the way the door was closing shut on women again in the 50s after the freedoms they were experiencing in the 30s and 40s.

Claire died very young.

She died at 52.

She had what we now understand to be a genetic predisposition to colon cancer.

At the time, they did not understand that.

I think there's a lot of reasons for this.

One is her label wasn't carried forward.

Claire didn't own her own label.

She had worked her way up at Townley.

She was working for a 7th Avenue manufacturer, and she ended up getting to become a partner in that company.

But then when she was gone, they didn't know what to do about it.

So Claire McArdle, when she died, Townley tried to keep her label alive probably for about a year, year and a half.