She starts selling her designs at Henri Bendel and finds success quickly.
1975
She patents Marii, a material from Australia that is dyed in Japan and pleated in the United States. “I started with China silks. I had them hand-painted, quilted, and pleated to give them a distinctive look. I found the pleats really didn’t hold. It took a man-made fabric to get really permanent pleats,” she told The New York Times.
1976
She becomes president of Mary McFadden Inc. and won her first Coty Award.
1977
Vogue declares that, in three years, Mary McFadden “has practically changed the way women look at night.”
Jill Robinson, who profiled the designer for the magazine, writes: “There isn’t a woman I talk to now who doesn’t respond to Mary McFadden’s name. And I am not just talking to women who follow fashion. My friend Martha Stewart said recently, ‘I saw Mary McFadden shopping. She has these fabulous Vuitton shopping bags and briefcase, and she was all wrapped in a pale gray shawl and carrying everything in the world. She has very long arms and must be terribly strong. It was wonderful to see. She knew exactly what she wanted.’
There is no question, in these past few years, Mary McFadden already has influenced what we wear. She told me, ‘I am going to be a mass designer. On my terms.’ And her terms are selective—her requirement is excellence.
In such places as Newport Beach, California, and Oklahoma City, women are buying and wearing Mary McFadden clothes. From Scottsdale, Arizona, to Birmingham in Michigan and Birmingham in Alabama, women are wearing jewels on satin cords, bindings of silk and braid, doing sashes bandolier style. From New Orleans to Kansas City, they are wearing the coats and the gowns. And in Philadelphia and Memphis (where it all began), lariats of golden leaves drape about bare shoulders, matte bronze grape leaves dangle from slender silk rope.
Women are tying the gold cuffs about their arms with black satin cord, wearing the wheels of gold that make the hands look lean and fragile. In Seattle and Chicago, they are buying McFadden ornaments for the hair, picking up skeins and chignons of artificial hair to add on, as Mary sometimes does at night. And in all of our homes, we are using and seeing art differently. Art melds with craft.”
