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 world. The result of her curiosity is a book that brings the reader through McCardell’s fascinating life, from her childhood in Frederick, Maryland, to the fashion houses of New York and Paris.

As a writer, I wanted to know how Evitts Dickinson had expanded the article into a book, and what follows is an edited and condensed version of the conversation we had in August at her house in Baltimore.

Kristina Gaddy: This will come out during New York Fashion Week, and I think sharing the story of how this week came to be points to how central McCardell was to the creation of what we now think of as American women’s fashion.

Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson: Part of what I wanted to explore in this book wasn’t just Claire McCardell in isolation as this one designer who pioneered and invented all these things that we still wear today, but as a part of this entire forgotten generation of women in the 1930s and 1940s who built American fashion. They were being really clever and realized there was an opportunity for New York to be the center of a fashion industry that didn’t just copy Paris, but could originate designs that were meant for American women. The haute couture system was about dressing the wealthy, and what the American garment industry had been was a watering down of that with cheap knockoffs.

McCardell succeeded because women like Eleanor Lambert invented the role of publicity for the fashion designer. A media ecosystem to get the story of fashion out there did not exist in New York. In Paris, the press would be there for the openings; they had a consistent week. Lambert, in addition to pitching these women fashion designers and their stories in magazines, believed reporters needed to be in New York at a specific time, so designers could show new clothes over one or two weeks.

There were also a lot of ambitious female journalists who were being shuffled to society pages or to fashion, and these journalists would then approach fashion as if it were a beat. You get not only the formation of Fashion Week, which started as a press week; you’re starting to see fashion coverage on the business pages and other arenas, where the journalists wrote about it like it was an industry worth covering—which it was.

KG: You’ve known of Claire McCardell and her story for nearly two decades, having first encountered her story while working at what is now the Maryland Center for History and Culture and then writing a feature on her for Washington Post Magazine— how and when did you know that her story could make a book?

EED: I like to use my journalism as a way to see if a story deserves a longer story. I had this feeling that there was a book about Claire McCardell, but I wanted to test my theory while also, frankly, getting paid to do it. So I pitched a story to the Washington Post Magazine in 2018, because it was the anniversary of this pivotal dress that McCardell designed. One of the things that I’ve realized in my career is you have to have the “Why now?” And the other thing is the hook—I thought that this story’s hook was about the feminism behind some of the clothes that we take for granted today.

I reported that story and when I finished it I realized that there has been a lot written about what McCardell did, but not how she did it. I was really curious about how a girl born in rural Frederick, Maryland, in 1905 went on to create what we know as American fashion. After writing that article, I knew that McCardell deserved a deeper look.

KG: How did having the article on McCardell help you get a book deal?