Vera Maxwell

Vera Huppe Maxwell (April 22, 1901, New York City – January 15, 1995, Rincón, Puerto Rico) was a pioneering sportswear and fashion designer.

Born Vera Huppe in the Bronx, Maxwell spent part of her childhood in Austria. She attended Leonia High School in Leonia, New Jersey.

She studied ballet in New York and joined the Metropolitan Opera Ballet in 1919, dancing until her marriage to financier Raymond J. Maxwell in 1924. Vera and Raymond J. Maxwell has one child and divorced in 1937.

Maxwell married architect Carlisle H. Johnson in 1938 and divorced him in 1945.

In the late 1920s, Maxwell began modelling at B. Altman and other New York City stores. As she explained, "When the opera season ended in May, the fashion houses on Seventh Avenue were just opening their collections. I would just walk across the street and hire on as a model." Around 1929, Maxwell began sketching for the fashion houses she modeled for.

After years of designing for other manufacturers, she founded her own company, Vera Maxwell Originals, in 1947. Her first collection was sporty, featuring after-ski clothes, tennis outfits, and riding apparel.

Maxwell was part of a pioneering group of American designers creating more relaxed and quintessentially American clothing. Her contemporaries included Claire McCardell, Clare Potter, Carolyn Schnurer, and Tina Leser. Maxwell gave her clothing distinctively American names like "Daniel Boone" for Western wear. By the 1950s, she also was designing evening wear.

Maxwell was the first American designer to make clothes of Ultrasuede and the synthetic fabric Arnel. One of her earliest best-sellers was a wrap blouse over a permanently pleated skirt made of Arnel meant for travelers.

In 1935, Maxwell released a "weekend wardrobe" of two jackets, two skirts and a pair of trousers. Inspired by Albert Einstein, the jacket was collarless with four patch pockets in tweed and gray flannel. The jacket could be mixed and matched with all three accompanying pieces: a short pleated flannel tennis skirt, a longer tweed skirt, and a pair of flannel cuffed trousers. In 1999, the New York Times wrote that the "weekend wardrobe" was "so classic they could still be worn today."

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