Mary McFadden, ‘Life Force’ in Fashion Industry, Dies at 85
This story was updated on Sept. 15 at 12:15 p.m.
Mary McFadden, a pantheon in American design, died Friday at the age of 85 at her home in Southampton, N.Y. The designer, whose career spanned 70 years, had been in declining health, according to Joan Olden, who had joined McFadden’s company at its inception in 1972.
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Plans for a service or memorial have not yet been finalized.
Born in New York to a socialite mother and an affluent cotton broker father, McFadden spent her childhood in Tennessee. After attending the Foxcroft School of Virginia, she continued her studies at Columbia University, Ecole Lubec at the Sorbonne, at the Traphagen School of Design and The New School for Social Research.
Nicknamed “the archeologist of Seventh Avenue,” over the decades McFadden mined her extensive art knowledge and travels to more than 60 countries in Europe, West Africa, Mongolia and Asia for her designs.
In her fashion designs, she carved out a niche for herself from the competition by creating hand-painted textiles, opulent beading, bejeweled embellishment and signature Mari pleating. In an interview with WWD earlier this year, she singled out her time in Paris as a teenager at the Sorbonne for leaving an indelible impression on her outlook on life.
A Fashion Trailblazer
Not one to be impressed by fame or fortune, McFadden was intrigued by all types of people. Getting into fashion as a career was “inevitable” from her point of view, since she was always interested in how she dressed and how things were constructed. Beyond her intercontinental creations, McFadden broke boundaries in other ways, too — namely as the first woman to lead the Council of Fashion Designers of America in the early 1980s. A decade prior she forged another first by housing her company on West 35th Street instead of following the more well-worn route of Seventh Avenue as generations of other major designers had done. At that time in the struggling city, Garment District side streets were somewhat sketchy.
McFadden, whose luminescent complexion was a signature as much as her designs, had a well-rounded understanding of the fashion industry, due partially to her experience working for magazines and in public relations. After meeting the head of Christian Dior at a cocktail party, she informed him that she would like to come in for an interview. The assertive but refined McFadden did just that the following day.
She also had a zeal for marriage, having wed 11 times. Asked for her view on marriage in a May interview with WWD, she described it as “a very dicey operation.” But the designer had said she was glad to have wed 11 times, because “each person was a different experience.” And she hadn’t ruled out the prospect of a 12th wedding.
A lifelong tennis player and longtime skier, McFadden appreciated athletic competition. But she took the long view in terms of fashion rivals in her heyday. In the interview earlier this year, McFadden said, “I didn’t have any competition. The competition was to stay in business, to be profitable and to be successful.”
She was equally even-keeled about what makes people shop or spend now. “Vanity. That’s always the case,” she said.
Fashion designer and former CFDA president Stan Herman described McFadden Sunday as “a life force. To be with Mary on the streets was like being with Princess Diana. Everybody knew her. She was never unrecognized.”
McFadden was a serious designer, who took her art seriously, Herman said. “She was consistent. She was a poet. She knew what she knew how to do. She didn’t stretch herself into other areas that she felt uncomfortable with. She did what came naturally to her,” Herman said.
McFadden also took being president of the CFDA seriously [for one term in the 1980s] and “worked at it,” according to Herman. “She didn’t use it as a pulpit for herself. I remember she really wanted to televise the CFDA awards, but that never happened.”
McFadden had donated close to 350 pieces from her personal archives to Drexel University in Philadelphia, where the retrospective “Modern Ritual: The Art of Mary McFadden” is currently on view.
Matthew Yokobosky, senior curator of fashion and material culture at the Brooklyn Museum, said Saturday, “In American fashion, Mary McFadden emerged in the ’70s with other women designers like Norma Kamali, Elsa Peretti and Diane von Furstenberg, who were reimagining women’s wardrobes during the sexual revolution. McFadden, with a vast knowledge of art and world history, merged comfort and extravagant embellishments that told tales of far-flung locales and age-old decorative practices. She made statement pieces that allowed women to walk into a room with a commanding presence.”
After shuttering her namesake company in 2022, McFadden devoted more of her attention to her art. As for what she wanted people to think about when they heard her name, she said, “They will think of my dresses of course. And that I am a damn good tennis player. I am.”
McFadden is survived by a brother, John. She was predeceased by another brother, George, and her daughter from her first marriage, Justine Harari.
Her Tennessee childhood centered around a cattle-encircled modern house that was designed by Bernard Harrison, a designer of the United Nations. Pigs, 100 beagles, a Shetland pony and an indoor beehive were part of the environs that neighbored the cotton plantation used by her family’s firm, George H. McFadden & Bros., cotton merchants.
She came from a long line of innovators and travelers. A great uncle, Charles Sundance Cutting, was the first Western man to visit Tibet in 1935 to 1937 in order to negotiate a cotton deal with the Dalai Lama. Her grandfather, who was a descendant of Robert Fulton who created the first commercialized steamboat, is credited with making the first commercialized bedside radio. Her father was among the founding developers of Squaw Valley. In 1948, he died there in a ski avalanche.
Upon meeting Dior North America’s Henry Sherman at a cocktail party in New York, McFadden said she would like to come in for an interview the following day. Admitting that she had never worked in public relations, McFadden suggested that there be an unpaid trial run and that he could fire her after a few months if she fell short. However, if she did a good job, she wanted to be paid. That turned out to be the case and her first payment was 20 Dior New York dresses and 20 Dior haute couture dresses. In turn, she sold the dresses to friends and bought a Rufino Tamayo painting, which sparked her interest in collecting art and her Biet Giorges Trust. Over the years, McFadden amassed works by Paul Klee, Henry Moore, Richard Lindner, Morris Louis and scores of other artists.
Moving to Africa
In 1965, McFadden’s life turned in another direction after marrying her first husband, Philip Harari, grandson of Sir Victor Harari, Pasha, a representative of the Queen of England in Egypt. (“The Alexandra Quartet” by Laurence Durrell was inspired by the Harari family.)
The newlyweds lived in South Africa, where Harari was an executive at De Beers and Anglo America. Their home included a Palladian garden with eight terraces, a pool with cascading water over rocks, a fig orchard, and two pergolas (designed by McFadden) that were covered with white bougainvillea for dinner parties. During that time, fashion authoritarian Diana Vreeland lined up a job for McFadden as Vogue South Africa’s editor and she tripled subscriptions to 15,000 within a year. Working with the photographer Sam Haskins, she defined the magazine with a more expansive scope. She once flew across Madagascar in a Gipsy Moth with the lensman David Goldblatt to feature the people of southern Africa. Vreeland and McFadden became lifelong friends and the designer once said she had saved Vreeland years later from “a fatal slide in her marble bathroom floor.”
After another Condé Nast leader, Igor Patsevitch, advised leaving South Africa due to looming racial unrest, McFadden did so, but not before selling her 1,000-acre tobacco farm, which included a Greek Orthodox Church near Transvaal to the government for a great profit.
McFadden then took a job as a reporter at the Rand Daily Mai, an anti-government newspaper where she penned the “Mary Quite Contrary” column. Her key advice was that “a great journalist only has to ask one question and the rest will be revealed.”
The American creative’s second marriage to Frank McEwan, director of the Rhodes National Gallery in what is now Harare, opened up other doors, namely the long-awaited opportunity to develop a workshop for 30 artists complete with three rondavels. For $20,000 worth of land, she developed a 90-acre site near what is now Zimbabwe.
Dissatisfied with the clothing options there, McFadden started collecting textiles in markets in Addis, Lalibella, Malawi and other locales and took them to a dressmaker to create simple dresses that were meant to be weightless, seamless and without any visible tucks. McFadden later created her first collection on her own lithesome frame. Inspired by classical Egyptian tunics, caftans and togas, she selected models that were reminiscent of “Madonna of the Rocks” by Leonardo da Vinci.
Back in the U.S.
After returning to the U.S. in 1971, McFadden joined Vogue’s art department under Alexander Liberman. The fashion magazine featured her in a two-page spread wearing what she later described as her “poorly crafted clothes.” Working on a feature about Henri Bendel chief executive officer Geraldine Stutz, McFadden went to one of the retailer’s weekly open calls for designers and Stutz offered to stage a press show for McFadden that fall. After telling Stutz she didn’t know how to make clothes, the executive introduced her to the Japanese technician Mitsu, who worked at Bendel Studio.
He and McFadden toiled on her first collection of togas, tunics and quilted jackets in her un-air-conditioned Upper East Side apartment, where McFadden had to stand on a chair for them to check the proportions of each garment, by using the only mirror in the place, which was above a bathroom sink. The effort paid off, with her first collection selling $1 million worth of merchandise.
McFadden then sold her Biet Giorgis Trust at Sotheby’s for $1 million in order to set up a Garment District workshop that was run by the French-trained Lily Granick, whom McFadden said developed the cutting for the “Mari” technique of plated silk pinned on paper patterns. Named after the Japanese version of “Mary,” the Princess required polyester satin back fiber that the designer found in Australia. It was meant to “fall like liquid gold on the body as if it were ancient Chinese silk,” McFadden once wrote.
After Granick was “truly and tragically” killed after being struck by a bus, the entire factory attended her funeral. McFadden once compared running a factory to like being a mother to 50 people. “Every day there is a problem and not a day goes by that there is not a problem,” she said, adding that calls to sales, production, lawyers, accountants and other key components of her business to manage those problems were near constant.
Her first showroom was filled with conceptual art that she found as curator for the Lannan Foundation. A 20-foot Alan Shields painting, a 12-foot boat by Wilcox and Sapron sails were attached to the ceiling. McFadden also worked with Stephen Paley, Rich Einhorn and James and Astor for music for her shows. Isamu Noguchi was among her friends.
Her talent led to her first Coty award within three years of starting her business. She was also inducted into the Coty Hall of Fame and featured on the International Best Dressed List.
Fashion designer Ralph Rucci said Sunday, “No one, no one, after all of these decades can completely comprehend her genius, her intellectual rigor, her extraordinary cultural and historical knowledge that she manifested in her work. The audience was always transported to that place — another civilization that she alone lived in. She carried all of this within and this is why she literally held herself as a temple in the way that she spoke and moved. And what lingers most of all is her grace.”
Her artistic inclinations leaned in other ways, too, as a founding director of the Sundance Institute. A consummate entertainer, she hosted parties for famed British publisher Lord George Weidenfeld and Hank Luce’s fledgling New Museum. One soirée for Sundance’s Robert Redford nearly caused “a stampede on the streets below,” McFadden once said.
Her numerous marriages included one hours-long one to the King of Dogib, who had ceremoniously wreathed her in good jewelry. Two failed kisses prompted her to leave with her entourage that same night, walking “26 miles in the moonlight out of Dogon” and with her good jewelry.
Olden, who was a former president of McFadden’s company, said the designer could speak with people from all walks of life. “She was not selfish. She shared. She was curious. If you were to bring up something about Tibet or the Dalai Lama, she would be curious because she’d been there,” Olden said. “She could talk to anyone in the world, from a college student to the president or the head of the United Nations. She was comfortable with people and they were comfortable with her. It was a talent that came naturally to her.”
After recognizing “the noticeable pall” on Seventh Avenue following the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and predicting that people would not go to balls again as they once did, McFadden explained, “My clothes were of the past.” Although she shuttered her business, McFadden archived her bejeweled robes, ancient textiles, and archival gold collection.
In 2009, when the National Museum of Women in the Arts featured her designs in an exhibition, which marked the first time fashion was celebrated by the museum, McFadden said fashion designers should be appreciated as artists because many dresses are paintings in their own right. She also noted that all if the gowns and dresses in view were part of her private collection, as well as ones she had worked on and could still fit into.
In a televised interview in 1984, McFadden recalled how she was unable to speak when she was very young and could only sputter one sentence at a time due to shyness. “I had to work so hard to be heard,” she said.
Decades after overcoming that, she dove into fashion with similar determination, staying up all night every night to finesse her designs until those skills came naturally. “God had really blessed me with an incredible gift. My sense of beauty, which is inside of me, I can project that for the various products that we create,” McFadden.
In the end, McFadden told another interviewer in 2009 that what she really provided was what everyone wanted: “To escape the commonality of life.”
Herman, who used to play tennis with McFadden regularly, reflected Sunday, “Mary had a good time when she was here. She made the world sit up and take notice. She was a true New York City icon.”
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