A Brief History of the Pop-Over Dress

One of Claire McCardell’s many claims to fame

“It was the year when maids were leaving domestic service jobs for factories, and a lot of women were consequently doing their own housework for the first time. Their principal concern previously had been to look smart and attractive, and they still wanted to look that way, even if they now had to do the dishes and the dusting.”

Beryl Williams, Fashion is Our Business, 1945

Welcome to the inaugural Wednesday Edition¹ of the No Accounting for Taste Newsletter, which, let’s be honest, is mostly historical in nature and not exactly “news,” but that’s the way we like it, right? In establishing some kind of cadence, my hope is to provide a free newsletter one or two Wednesdays per month and to offer my paid subscribers a Sunday Edition each week. Today I’m talking about the history of Claire McCardell’s Pop-over dress and on Sunday we’ll discuss how the dress evolved over the following 16 years (with a little surprise).

I’ll get to the dress in a minute, but first I got curious about the above statement and the premise on which the popovers story is based: women having to do their own housework because their servants went to more lucrative (by as much as four times the weekly salary) war work. How many women actually had domestic help in the 1930s and early 40s?

Turns out that in the early part of the 20th century, it was extremely common, though service numbers did dip during WWI. The next great war signaled the death knell for domestic servants for a variety of reasons that are beyond the scope of this writing, but even in the late 1930s and early 1940s many middle- and upper-class American households relied on some kind of domestic help. The labor purchased (primarily by white women) was usually that of Black or immigrant women, and was most often part time, or if full time, not living with the family—a shift from late 19th century norms where many servants lived in their employers’ home. As an illustration of this, Claire McCardell's family almost certainly had domestic help when she was a child—we know at the very least they hired a dressmaker twice a year and they could certainly afford more—but they reported no employees living with them. Her father, however, who also spent his childhood in Frederick, Maryland, grew up with two live-in servants.

But how many households is “many” at the time this dress was conceived? Through the early 1940s, the most reported occupation for women in the workforce was "Personal Service: Private Household" according to the U.S. Department of Labor - roughly 20% in 1940. Some of these women would have worked for more than one family, and a few families employed more than one servant, so it's tough to draw conclusions from that number but it does seem to indicate that it was a relatively common profession. A survey for Fortune magazine (not exactly a scientific study) reported that "70 percent of the rich, 42 percent of the upper middle class, 14 percent of the lower middle class, and 6 percent of the poor reported hiring some [domestic] help."² Most of the lower middle class and poor families hiring help were in fact hiring laundry services, and not necessarily the cooks or housekeepers we, who have grown up with washing machines, might picture when we think of domestic help. I'm willing to bet there was quite a bit of class overlap between Fortune readers and Harper's Bazaar households - primarily upper-middle to upper class, educated, and making enough money to outsource some or all of the housework. There aren't a lot of concrete numbers out there for exactly what percentage of households hired help, partially because of the lack of definition of what constitutes a domestic servant. For example, in Los Angeles in the mid-1930s, about 42% of lower-middle-class homes paid for domestic labor, but only 9% of such households paid for domestic labor beyond laundry service.³ I also get the feeling that because so much of household service was women's work, it seems like at the time there just wasn't a lot of attention paid to it, so the data is a bit fuzzy and forgotten. Faye E. Dudden in her paper Experts and Servants: The National Council on Household Employment and the Decline of Domestic Service in the Twentieth Century, wrote that "A moment's reflection suggests that the disappearance of live-in domestic service from the middle class home had ramifications for a number of aspects of home life, including parent-child relations, food ways, domestic architecture and concepts of privacy, not to mention the roles and responsibilities of adult women. And yet the decline of domestic service in the twentieth century does not seem to have been the subject of great public comment as it occurred.”⁴

All this is to say that handling all domestic tasks probably was new to many, if not most, middle- and upper-class married women who were suddenly expected to parent their children, plan and cook nutritious meals, keep their homes spotlessly clean and welcoming, and be a supportive and gracious mate for their husbands—not to mention volunteer beyond their homes for the Red Cross or other war work. They could easily have purchased a $2 cotton house dress or 89¢ pinafore apron to begin their new lives without hired help, but having a designer dress advertised in Bazaar helped to legitimize the endeavor and assure these women that doing without was not only helping the war effort, it was chic as well.

Muriel Fillans Lane, wife of champion polo player Michael Phipps, models the Pop-over in her sprawling Long Island home.⁵ Photo by Louise Dahl-Wolfe for Harper’s Bazaar, November 1942

And so it was that Diana Vreeland and Carmel Snow of Harper's Bazaar came to Claire with a challenge to create a garment that would be suitable for both housework and light unexpected entertaining or doing some shopping, to be practical and stylish at once.

"Characteristically, Clare obliged with a dress that all women, rich and poor, accustomed to housework or not, took to their hearts. She made what came to be called the 'Pop-over.' It worked like a smock, fastening simply in front; it was easy to slip into and could be worn over an afternoon dress for last-minute jobs in the kitchen or by itself, for a full day's work, and it was of sturdy denim that laundered easily and flattened out on the ironing board when it had to be pressed. It solved a lot of problems, all at once. It worked, and women worked in it by the thousands."

Beryl Williams, Fashion is Our Business, 1945

Harrisburg Evening News, January 6, 1943

The first appearance in HB did not call the dress the "Pop-over," but subsequent newspaper advertisements did, and it was certainly called the Pop-over before its debut in HB. The story of how it came to be called “Pop-over” is a bit muddled. One legend has it that Claire herself named it spontaneously when asked by buyers what to call it - “you just pop it over!” Other sources attribute the name to execs at Lord & Taylor (probably Dorothy Shaver & co) who, while lunching at the Algonquin hotel, spotted the pastry of the same name and found it apropos.⁶ Later, in her book What Shall I Wear? Claire defined “Pop-over” as “Something that goes over anything. It is an apron one day, a bathrobe the next, a dinner dress, if necessary, with lots of beads.”⁷

The retail cost was $7 in 1942; accounting for inflation this is roughly $125. I say this time and time again, but that was on the low-ish end for a dress at that time, as clothing generally cost more and lasted longer, and people had fewer garments than we do today. The cheap cotton house dresses already available for housework could be washed and mended for a few years years but couldn't compare to the "sturdy denim" chosen for McCardell's Pop-over. ‘I’d always wondered why women’s clothes had to be delicate—why they couldn’t be practical and sturdy as well as feminine,” Claire said.⁸ The denim was a risky choice at the time, at least according to Claire’s boss Adolph Klein, who balked at the request from Lord & Taylor to increase the material order from 10,000 yards to 75,000. He did so only after asking Claire to come up with additional designs for the denim, and she designed a suit and a coat. But the denim popover was wildly successful. ‘Within a year Townley had used a quarter of a million yards of the denim for 75,000 popovers. Moreover, the denim suit and coat sold well too and launched that doughty fabric on a glamorous career that has continued ever since,” wrote Sally Kirkland in her 1975 recollection of McCardell history.⁹

Ad for denim suit as seen in The Berkshire Eagle, April 12, 1943

The disastrous fallout from McCardell’s oft-copied 1938 Monastic dress which put Townley out of business for several years taught Klein some valuable lessons; they had the Pop-over design patented for three and a half years and made the dress in other names for stores like Best & Co. in order to beat the knockoffs and avoid being copied again.¹⁰ If the Monastic dress made Claire famous on Seventh Avenue, the Pop-over made her a household name across America.

Next time, we’ll look at how the Pop-over evolved after its debut. The Sunday Edition will be for paid subscribers only, and as a special thank you and welcome, I’ll be including a giveaway for those who wish to participate. Enjoy the rest of your week, and keep wearing history.

1. I’m aware that it is in fact Thursday, but as this was my first, I wanted to give it one last look in the morning before sending it out. This feels like a bigger deal than a blog or IG post!

2. D’Ann Campbell, Women at War, 284, n. 16. citing Roper-Fortune poll, October 1937, in Hadley Cantril and Mildred Strunk, Public Opinion, 1935–1946 (Princeton University Press, 1951), 791.

3. Phyllis Palmer, Domesticity and Dirt: Housewives and Domestic Servants in the United States, 1920–1945 (Temple University Press, 1989).

4. Faye E. Dutton, “Experts and Servants: The National Council on Household Employment and the Decline of Domestic Service in the Twentieth Century” Journal of Social History 20 no. 2 (Winter 1986), 269.

5. Sally Kirkland, American Fashion, ed. Sarah Tomerlin Lee (Quadrangle/New York Times, 1975), 254.

6. Kirkland, American Fashion, 254.

7. Claire McCardell, What Shall I Wear? The What, Where, When and How Much of Fashion (Simon & Schuster, 1956).

8. Beryl Williams, Fashion is our Business (J.B. Lippincott, 1945), 90.

9. Kirkland, American Fashion, 254.

10. Kohle Yohannan and Nancy Nolf, Claire McCardell: Redefining Modernism (Harry N. Abrams, 1998), 67-68.