Famous for pioneering sportswear ("The American Look"), Vera Maxwell designed sustainable clothes in the present for the future, blending an Old World charm into each seam. She reigned in mid-century from the 1940s to the 1980s. Her benchmark—style versus fashion—began as a girl in the Bronx where she reinvented hand-me-downs from her sister. It was this tenacity to invent and reinvent that drew people of all walks of life into her fold. As a woman, she became a manufacturing leader for her generation during a time when predominantly masculine investors ran the fashion industry.
Vera wanted others to remember her devotion to making timeless clothes that women could move around in, inspiration from her beginnings as a ballet dancer for the Metropolitan Opera Company. "It's a source of great satisfaction to me to know that my clothes are kept and cherished for years. I wanted to be an always designer and never a now designer." Born in New York in 1901, Vera worked on Seventh Avenue in Manhattan into her eighties. Her designs live on at the Metropolitan Museum, Smithsonian, Museum of the City of New York, and at fashion archive collections throughout the country.
A recipient of Vera's kindness from childhood, Allie Bullock, whose father, Denis Bullock, was Vera's first cousin, drew from firsthand experience, family archives, and research to write this story. The author is a freelance writer, editor, and part-time journalist based in Southern California.