2025 Wicker Endowment Lecture with Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson

Discover the riveting hidden history of Claire McCardell, the most influential fashion designer you’ve never heard of.

Join us for an evening with award-winning writer Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson. She will share how fashion innovator Claire McCardell popularized comfort and practicality in women’s fashion with zippers, pockets, and ballet flats and more. McCardell’s work reinvented American sportswear and set women free from the severe, hyper-feminized silhouette championed by male designers after World War II.

Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson’s work has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Harper’s, The Washington Post Magazine, and many other publications. She has recently talked about McCardell at New York’s Jewish Museum, the Maryland Center for History and Culture, and The New York Historical. Her new book, Claire McCardell: The Designer Who Set Women Free, is getting rave reviews from all around:

Claire McCardell revolutionized the way we dress; everything was intentional, nothing was frivolous, and comfort was as vital as glamour. This book captures her remarkable ingenuity and entrepreneurial spirit, and it offers a new, intimate glimpse into the experiences, people, and places that shaped her perspective.

—Tory Burch

In the hands of Dickinson, this is more than just the biography of a fashion revolutionary: It is a story of the fight for women’s identity and, incidentally, the birth of an American industry.

—The New York Times

Signing to follow with copies available to purchase from Scuppernong Books.

Free program. RSVP to save your spot.

This program is in partnership with UNC Greensboro Consumer, Apparel, and Retail Studies

About the Endowment

Ruth Perkins Wicker created the John Floy Wicker Endowment Fund in memory of her husband in 1995. Architect John Wicker helped design and build many of Greensboro’s most memorable structures, from Friendly Shopping Center to Page High School. He also had a lifelong interest in history, and the endowment in his name has supported nearly 20 free public programs at the museum, including talks by distinguished scholars including Malinda Maynor Lowery, John Shelton Reed, Lynn Dumenil, and Charles Reagan Wilson.