Born 1903 in Jersey City, New Jersey, American fashion designer Clare Potter was one of the first American fashion designers to be promoted as an individual design talent in the 1930s. Working under her elided name Clarepotter, she has been credited as one of the inventors of American sportswear.
Fashion designs by Clare Potter in the 1940s and ’50s
Based in Manhattan, Potter continued designing through the 1940s and 1950s. Her clothes were renowned for being elegant, but easy-to-wear and relaxed, and for their distinctive use of colour. She founded a ready-to-wear fashion company in Manhattan named Timbertop in 1948, and in the 1960s she also established a wholesale company to manufacture fashions.
Potter was one of the 17 women gathered together by Edna Woolman Chase, editor-in-chief of Vogue to form the Fashion Group International, Inc., in 1928. She died in 1999 at home in Fort Ann, New York at the age of 95.
Model in two-piece evening dress of pink crêpe, the skirt wraps and holds with heavy tucks at the hem, the blouse is split in front, by Clare Potter, photo by Louise Dahl-Wolfe, Harper’s Bazaar, November 1944
Model in golden-beige crêpe, bound and tied with shoestrings of the crêpe and banded in eggshell blue, the stole is in beige, blue and gold by Clare Potter, photo by Louise Dahl-Wolfe, Harper’s Bazaar, April 1945
Model wearing a coral-colored rayon dress with matching shawl from Clare Potter, standing on the roof of New York’s MOMA, 1945
Model in long, supple sheath of beige wool jersey down to the hemtop where it breaks out in pleats and loops in bright gilt thread by Clare Potter, photo by Louise Dahl-Wolfe at the Wildenstein Gallery, Harper’s Bazaar, September 1946
Barbara Tullgren in an ice-yellow and heat-yellow stretch of a dress by Clare Potter, photo by John Rawlings, Vogue, June 1, 1947
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