Mary McFadden, a fashion designer who drew on ancient themes for modern wear, weaving the colors and motifs of Greek antiquity, Egyptian mythology and the Italian Renaissance into clothing that made her for years a fixture of haute couture, died Sept. 13 in Southampton, N.Y. She was 85.
By Emily Langer
Ms. McFadden spent her career making what admirers considered wearable art, a line of clothing so original that any of her creations was immediately identifiable as hers. From season to season, she traversed centuries and continents in her themed collections, the products of her insatiable curiosity about the world and a jet-setting life that allowed her to see it.
The daughter of a prosperous cotton broker, Ms. McFadden lived during the early years of her life on a cotton plantation in Tennessee where, by her account, there was “no thought of clothes.” She acquired her worldliness in part through her travels with her grandmother, who introduced Ms. McFadden to the Paris fashion scene when she was in her teens.
She began designing her own clothing in the 1960s when she accompanied her first of nearly a dozen husbands to South Africa, where he was a director of the De Beers diamond factory. Ms. McFadden became a journalist for Vogue South Africa and eventually moved to the magazine’s office in New York, where her designs impressed her colleagues and made their way into the magazine.
With backing from fashion editor Diana Vreeland, Ms. McFadden launched her namesake label in 1976. She dressed women including Babe Paley, the trendsetting wife of CBS chairman William S. Paley, and former first lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.
Ms. McFadden’s calling card was a patented, pleated synthetic fabric that she called Marii. (The term was her first name rendered with what she described as “a Japanese feeling to it.”) She sourced the material in Australia, shipped it to Japan to be dyed and then brought it to the United States, where it underwent a heat-transfer treatment that set permanent tiny pleats.
The pleats gave the impression, as Ms. McFadden once described it to the New York Times, that the material fell “like liquid gold against the body.” On a practical level, the process made the fabric virtually impossible to crease, a distinct advantage for Ms. McFadden’s wealthy clientele who toted her clothing in suitcases around the world.
“They could get into a plane and never have to worry,” she told an interviewer, Laura McLaws Helms, in 2013. “One time, in Florida one of the maids in the hotel picked up one of my Marii pleated dresses and she went downstairs to try to take the creases out and she came back to my client — she was apologizing as she was unable to take the pleats out. She tried all day!”
Ms. McFadden used her Marii fabric as well as opulent embroidery and beading in collections that seemed to know no geographic or historical bounds.
Her Greek collection featured pleated gowns that fell straight down in a manner that recalled the columns of Acropolis and other ruins. To evoke ancient Egypt, she incorporated striking gold macramé, said Rachel Sepielli, the assistant curator of the Mary McFadden archive at Drexel University’s Fox Historic Costume Collection in Philadelphia.
Ms. McFadden devoted a year of study to “The Tale of Genji,” an 11th-century novel by the Japanese noblewoman Murasaki Shikibu, before creating a collection that transferred the botanical imagery of the literary work to hand-painted clothing.
Perhaps her most acclaimed collection, according to Sepielli, was one inspired by the Medici family of Florence in Renaissance Italy. The designs, made from luxurious velvet, featured heraldic imagery and embroidery, along with puffed sleeves that updated a centuries-old style for the 1980s fashion world.
Ms. McFadden, whose designs were first sold at the luxury department store Henri Bendel and came to include jewelry, lingerie, linens and home furnishings, closed her business in 2002.
“People’s lifestyles have changed. It’s a much more relaxed way of living,” she told the Wall Street Journal a few years later. “They wear blue jeans a lot of the time, and these very exaggerated, opulent clothes didn’t have a place in the 21st century.”
Ms. McFadden cultivated a personal image as arresting as many of her designs, with a jet-black bob hairstyle and a face that she powdered to a pale white. She was an irresistible subject for society-page scribes since her days as a debutante with an aura of privilege that belied the difficulties of her youth.
Mary Josephine McFadden was born on Oct. 1, 1938, in New York City. Her mother was a concert pianist and, like Ms. McFadden’s father, came from a wealthy and socially prominent family.
Ms. McFadden spent roughly her first decade on the plantation near Memphis where her father’s career had taken the family. She and her two brothers moved with their mother to Long Island after their father was killed in an avalanche while skiing in Colorado in 1948.
Ms. McFadden, who attended the Foxcroft boarding school in Middleburg, Va., recalled a distant relationship with her mother. “You were not invited to the table until you were twenty years old because it was felt you had nothing interesting to say,” Ms. McFadden told New York magazine in 1990.
Ms. McFadden studied at the Traphagen School of Fashion in New York City — her only formal training in fashion design — as well as at the Sorbonne in Paris and Columbia University.
She worked briefly in public relations at Dior before moving with her first husband, Philip Harari, to South Africa, where she had a daughter and ventured into journalism with a job at Vogue South Africa.
She was reporting from Rhodesia, modern-day Zimbabwe, when she met Frank McEwen, a leading art gallerist whom she married after divorcing Harari. Following her divorce from McEwan, Ms. McFadden returned to the United States with her daughter and began working as a special projects editor at Vogue.
Ms. McFadden described marriage as a “very dicey operation.” She met one of her husbands, Armin Schmidt, at a nightclub in New York, saw him little after they wed and filed for divorce on the grounds of what she characterized as desertion.
Her marriage in 1989 to Kohle Yohannan, then a college student, and their subsequent divorce attracted tabloid news coverage. She was later married to theatrical director Vasilios Calitsis and was a longtime partner of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Murray Gell-Mann.
Ms. McFadden told Women’s Wear Daily in May that she was happy she had married 11 times, because “each person was a different experience.” When asked if she would consider a 12th union, she replied, “surely.”
Ms. McFadden’s daughter, Justine Harari, died in 2023. Besides her brother, John, survivors include two half-brothers.
Despite her travels, which took her to dozens of countries, and a lifestyle that made her a celebrity equal to many of the women who wore her clothes, Ms. McFadden harked back to her early days on a plantation to describe herself as a “country girl.”
Only when she began to spend more time abroad, she said, did she begin to see “how fashion was really important in a woman’s life.”
“It hadn’t become important to me until I saw and was old enough to see how these women spent all day trying to make themselves beautiful,” she said, before adding: “You wouldn’t think that picking out a dress would be really important, but it is.”
