Three Women: Madeleine Vionnet, Claire McCardell, and Rei Kawakubo is an examination of construction and style in three great designers of the twentieth century. Each designer, in a a separate era of the century, provided a new concept and vision of dress. They reformulate and reform dress. All three offer clothing design as a conceptual and radical enterprise. They posit ideas as they work with material; they realize a definition of woman as they create the garment. In the instances of Vionnet, McCardell, and Kawakubo, these women make clothes that make women. These three women make clothes that foster a new intelligence and new directions in apparel. Their analytical considerations of construction, of the body, and of the social role of women were and are brave and abiding ideas about fashion.
Publication
Three Women: Madeleine Vionnet, Claire McCardell, and Rei Kawakubo by Harold Koda, Richard Martin, Laura Sinderbrand