As the author of one of the year’s most acclaimed fashion books, Baltimore’s Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson is finding herself in settings where she could be seen as one of the least fashionable people in the room.

“I love flat shoes. I’m not a high heels person,” she told me over a Zoom call last week.

In those moments, Dickinson remembers why she was invited in the first place.

“What I realized is that — so what? I’m there to talk about my book and my ideas, and I really do feel like Claire made me more confident at the end of this book to just embrace that and not worry about what other people think of me.”

She’s talking about the subject of her first book, “Claire McCardell: The Designer Who Set Women Free,” published in June to praise from The New York Times, NPR, Oprah Daily, author Laura Lippman and more.

The biography tells the life of McCardell, a Frederick native who went from a Townley Frocks designer to a fashion industry revolutionary, thanks to her culture-shifting pieces. She invented the modern ballet flat, made leggings and denims part of womenswear, and shunned corsets in favor of dress styles like the Monastic, a tent-shaped frock, and the wraparound Popover Dress. They became instant American staples for a consumer who valued chic style and practical design.

Part of the book’s success is its narrative’s universal appeal: A reader doesn’t need to have a deep interest in pockets or fabrics to root for McCardell, who benefits from having Dickinson — a detailed writer with bylines at The New Yorker, Harper’s and more — tell the story of a tenacious entrepreneur with a cinematic flair. Hear more about Dickinson’s process when she stops by Queen Takes Book in Columbia on Sept. 9 and the Ivy Bookshop on Oct. 10.

I spoke with Dickinson — who also teaches in the Maryland Institute College of Art’s graphic design MFA program — about publishing her first book, Frederick, amplifying women’s stories and more.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

This is your debut book. Were there things about the writing process that you were surprised to enjoy?

I love research. So this book, I spent a lot of time just diving down rabbit holes of research. And I think for me, the most challenging thing was how to structure a narrative arc that felt compelling and that didn’t get mired in all the research. It’s like an iceberg. You’re only seeing a tip of what I had.

I think both the most pleasurable and the most difficult aspects of writing this book were figuring out how to thread together all the various pieces of information I had and what to leave out, which was very hard because this book could have been a doorstopper of a biography if I’d wanted it to be. But I made a decision early on that I wanted to write a general interest book. I didn’t want the barrier to entry to be too big.

How would you describe Claire’s relationship with her hometown, Frederick?

I mean, Claire became wildly famous in her lifetime. She was on the cover of Time magazine and Life magazine. She was on TV and radio, and she continued to return to Frederick every year, multiple times a year. She was very devoted to her family, who remained in Frederick, [and] her mother, in particular, after her father died.

I was really curious in how Frederick played a role in who she became because our childhoods and our young adult life obviously set the foundation. One was that some might think of it as rural, it’s not. It’s very much at a crossroads of culture. Especially back then, there was so much cultural life, and there were politicians and suffragists coming through and giving speeches before suffrage passed.

Claire was introduced to arts and culture very young because of Frederick. There was also industry there — there were mills on the water, there were textile factories. She was witness to industries making things, and I think that helped her understand later how to marry design with mass production.

Then there was the influence of her family. Her grandfather owned his own candy company, and he designed and patented his own candy molds. I think there was this early introduction to an idea becoming a designed object, becoming salable, that probably helped her, because fashion really is this place where art meets commerce. And I think that she saw that art-meets-commerce reality in Frederick.

And then finally, her grandfather cofounded Hood College. So this idea that a college education and that exposure of a young woman to a broader set of intellectual discourse and the wider world was sort of baked into her family and, you know, not every young woman at that time got that. She was lucky to have that exposure.

The book describes Claire as “the most influential fashion designer you’ve never heard of.” Do you think there are certain characteristics of her story that made it particularly susceptible to falling through the cracks of history?

She was a woman. I mean, let’s be blunt. We’re living through a political moment where certain entities are actively trying to erase women’s stories, right? It’s not surprising to me that the story of American sportswear, which is what Claire and her other women designers invented, is largely understood by the subsequent generation of men, right? Calvin Klein and Halston and Ralph Lauren. I think, yeah, unfortunately, we love to erase a woman’s story.

Claire died at 52 from cancer. Toward the end of the book, the topic of legacy comes up. What legacy does she deserve?

She deserves to be known as one of the progenitors of American fashion, and she deserves to be remembered as someone who believed in the capacity, autonomy and independence of the women she dressed. She understood that fashion is more than what you wear each day. It’s how you get to move through the world and how you get to be seen. She believed that comfort was paramount to style, because if you’re comfortable in your clothes, then you can get on with your life.

I not only want people to remember what she invented and what she pioneered, I want people to remember why she did it. And I want them to understand that design and objects are much more than just clothes. They really are cultural.

What’s next for you?

I hope to work on another book, so I am in conversations right now about what that might be. I really love this marriage of deep research and surprising histories with almost like a novelistic approach to nonfiction — that sort of feels like my sweet spot, and that’s how I’ve always written as a long-form journalist writing magazine articles. I’m working right now on my next book proposal, which I can’t say anything more about, but when I can I’ll let you know.

Do you plan to do it from Baltimore for the foreseeable future?

Oh yeah, Baltimore is my home. I love it here. I have a daughter about to start Poly [Baltimore Polytechnic Institute], I’ve got a group of friends. I can truly think of no better place to be able to be a writer.