How Do You Turn an Article Into a Book?
Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson wrote a Washington Post piece about the riveting history of the most influential fashion designer you’ve never heard of—then realized she had something more on her hands.
Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson has been working in journalism for decades, and having been her friend for some of those years, I’m always impressed with her ability to take stories we think we know and transform them into something novel (like her piece about a mystery surrounding Dorothy’s Ruby Slippers) and to ferret out stories we don’t know and make them change the way we see the world (as in her story on the doll houses used for forensic training). Her new book Claire McCardell: The Designer Who Set Women Free—a New York Times Editor’s Choice and NPR Book of the Day—combines each of these ways of storytelling.
In 2018, Evitts Dickinson profiled McCardell for Washington Post Magazine, exploring how she modernized American women’s fashion with designs we still wear today—ballet flats, leotards, wrap dresses, among others. Five years after she wrote that article, Evitts Dickinson was still compelled by why Claire McCardell wasn’t more well known despite her contributions to the fashion w…