Julie Elber

But Claire, considering that she had been fired a couple of times, when she came back, she put all of her cards on the table because she said, I'm going to have my name on the label and I'm going to do my designs the way I want them to be done.

And for somebody to be doing that on 7th Avenue was really, really pretty ballsy on her part.

Shoes were rationed during World War II.

And she figured out a way that you could get around it in that ballet shoes were not rationed.

So she went to Capizio, the famous dance shoemaker, and said, would you make some that match my outfits?

Ta-da!

The creation of the ballet flat.

Borrowed from the ballet dancer for live young Americans by Claire McArdle for her Townley Frogs collection.

And Vreeland said, we need something that socialites can wear, darling, when we're...

cleaning our houses because all of our domestic help have left and gone to the defense plant.

Particularly at wartime, domestic help started going to the factories, and that generation had to learn how to cook.

It was kind of a novelty.

It was sort of like leading up to the whole Julia Child thing in the 60s when all of a sudden—

cooking became this much bigger deal in the U.S.

Here she is.

She's going to clean her house now.

She never had to do it before.

She says, I'm doing my own work.

The ideal garment for it, for cooking, dusting, scrubbing, painting, pottering, or any odd job around the house.

Designed by Clara McArdle, Lord and Taylor has it.