Mary McFadden, Celebrated Designer of Shimmering Dresses, Dies at 85
She took symbols from ancient cultures and translated them into intricate embroideries, beadings and paintings on clothes worn by the likes of Jacqueline Onassis.Mary McFadden, a fashion designer who was famous not just for her shimmering, pleated dresses, which cascaded freely to the floor, but also for her visage — stark white Kabuki-style makeup and bluntly cut ebony hair — died on Friday at her home in Southampton, N.Y. She was 85.Her brother John McFadden said the cause was myeloma dysplasia.Ms. McFadden took symbols from ancient cultures — the phoenix from China, shadow puppets from Indonesia — and translated them into intricate embroideries, beadings and paintings on her clothes.At Mary McFadden Inc., the company she ran from 1976 to 2002, she designed pleated dresses that she said she wanted to fall “like liquid gold” down a woman’s body. They were similar to those made by Mariano Fortuny and Henriette Negrin early in the 20th century, but they were made from a synthetic charmeuse that she sourced in Australia, dyed in Japan and machine-pressed in the United States — a fabric she patented in 1975 and called Marii.She designed dresses that resembled those worn by the women sculpted on the caryatids at the Acropolis in Greece, and her models imitated their poses for fashion shoots under the pediment of the New York Public Library. Jacqueline Onassis was among those who wore McFadden gowns.Ms. McFadden was the first female president of the Council of Fashion Designers of America. She served in that position from 1982 to 1983.The author, pianist and composer Christopher Mason said that he often ran into Ms. McFadden in the late 1980s and ’90s, and that he once found himself seated next to her at a dinner hosted by the Irish model Maxime de la Falaise for her daughter, Loulou.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
