Mary McFadden (1938-2024)
Rest In Peace Mary McFadden (October 1, 1938 – September 13, 2024). A formidable, striking beauty and a designer with unwavering taste, unending curiosity, and a visionary approach to revivalist clothing—and a genuinely lovely woman. A smart businesswoman, her designs were like no other—she pillaged the past to create garments that are instantly recognizable as a “Mary McFadden.”
I’ve written quite a bit about her and our personal connection on here over the years, so I thought I would share some links to those pieces. From a piece I wrote in 2013: “It is Mary McFadden’s curiosity about the world and sense of adventure that helped her produce clothes that are completely unique. McFadden’s designs are a complete testament to her interests and passions — spellbindingly recreated in luxurious fabrics and ornate embellishments. Like her peers (Blass, Beene, de la Renta), McFadden’s work did reflect the world of the society women they were worn by, but hers also eschewed trends to instead be timeless evocations of other epochs and cultures filtered through the eyes of a thoroughly modern working woman.”
Below are four newsletters that touch on various aspects of Mary’s life and work—the first, an interview I did with her in 2013.
For more on Mary, I recommend the beautifully designed and infinitely inspiring Mary McFadden: A Lifetime of Design, Collecting, and Adventure, published by Rizzoli in 2011.
Mary McFadden — Cultural Modernist
In my newsletter earlier this month on Mary McFadden’s hosting style, I mentioned that I had interviewed her in 2013. I received quite a few requests for the interview, both as comments or over email, so I am including it below. That year the Ornstein family, the then-owners of the Manhattan Vintage Show (it was sold in early 2022), told me they were in…
High-Fashion Styles in Entertaining 2: Mary McFadden
The second in my series on fashion designers entertaining (you can read the first one here), drawn from a 1976 issue of House Beautiful, centres on Mary McFadden. The only one of the five designers featured still living, McFadden still stylistically cuts a formidable, striking figure—still the raven hair severely pulled back, the heavy gold jewellery, t…
Delight in the Unexpected: Dinner Parties and Costume Balls with Mary McFadden
In coherence with her fashion designs and interiors, Mary McFadden’s dinners and parties took on a similarly imaginative tone. The menus, the tablescapes, the entertainment, the themes—all exuberantly creative, drawing on varied cultures and epochs, blended with an unerring eye for balance, proportion and chic. If one were to want to entertain like Mary…
Fashion: Of The Women
Any historic article on women working in the fashion industry is sure to engage my attention. When I first came across the article below (from a 1976 issue of Viva magazine) fifteen years ago, it immediately fascinated me. With an introduction seeming to lay out an overview of many of the types of jobs taken by women in the industry—“models, buyers, sel…