The Sportswear Country

Until 1940, American fashion did not exist as a concept. American women with money bought Paris; American women without money bought copies of Paris. The Seventh Avenue garment district made the copies. The editorial press — Vogue, Harper's Bazaar — treated American design as a regional accent on a French language.

Then came the war. In July 1940 the German army entered Paris, and for four years the American fashion industry was cut off from the source. Carmel Snow, at Harper's Bazaar, and Eleanor Lambert, the publicist who invented the New York press week, made a decision: if American women could not have Paris, they would be given American designers instead.

The one who delivered was Claire McCardell. Her leotards, wrap dresses, separates, and ballet flats were not versions of couture. They were sportswear — clothes for a woman who worked, drove, had children, took the subway. By 1945 McCardell had invented a category that Paris had never considered a category at all: ready-to-wear as a primary wardrobe rather than a compromise.

The Seventh Avenue Era

Post-war American fashion was built on three legs. The first was Seventh Avenue itself — the concentration of manufacturing in Midtown Manhattan that could produce McCardell's clothes at scale. The second was the emergence of the American designer-brand: Norman Norell, Mainbocher, Charles James, Halston — each operating as a named couturier but selling largely to the department-store customer. The third was the magazines: Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, Seventeen, Mademoiselle, the New York Times fashion page — the most powerful fashion press in the world.

By the 1970s the model had matured into the modern American designer brand. Ralph Lauren converted a 1962 necktie business into a global heritage empire. Calvin Klein minimalised American dress and sold it back to America. Donna Karan, in 1985, introduced the Seven Easy Pieces — a capsule wardrobe designed for the executive woman in a post-feminist working world.

The African-American Tradition

A parallel history, long underwritten, is the African-American contribution to American fashion. Ann Lowe designed Jacqueline Bouvier's wedding dress in 1953; Zelda Wynn Valdes dressed Josephine Baker; Willi Smith, Stephen Burrows, Patrick Kelly built independent houses that sold the Black urban silhouette back to the fashion establishment. In the 2010s this tradition crystallised in Virgil Abloh (Off-White, Louis Vuitton menswear, 2018) and Telfar Clemens — the first African-American designer to break, at scale, into the mainstream luxury conversation.

Streetwear and the Present

The 2000s and 2010s belonged to streetwear. The trajectory from Shawn Stussy's Huntington Beach print-shop (1980) to Hiroshi Fujiwara's Harajuku retail (1990s) to Supreme (1994) to Louis Vuitton × Supreme (2017) to Virgil Abloh's Louis Vuitton menswear debut (2018) is the most-documented American fashion story of the twenty-first century. What began as skater and hip-hop uniform is now the dominant vernacular of global luxury menswear.

The American fashion proposition remains, at its core, the one McCardell identified in 1942: clothes for an unprotocoled life. No other country has sold more of that to the world. It is, still, the American export.