 Christian Dior: The New Look
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Christian Dior
Model Wearing a Christian Dior Low Front Evening Gown
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With the war over, for women some things changed while others remained all too much the same. It is an oversimplification to see the war as a period of outright liberation for women, but nor is it true that they were just pushed back into the home after the cessation of hostiIities.
In Britain at least, there were serious labor shortages and women were encouraged to remain in the workforce. They were, however, ejected from many of the well-paid skilled jobs traditionaliy reserved for men, and were reassigned to low-paid "women's" work, in the professions as well as in factories and offices.
At the same time popular culture - in films, magazines and in fashion - moved away from prewar and wartime images of women on an equal footing with men, back into a nostalgic fantasy world in which women were either romantic period heroines or ambivalent femmes fatales. Meanwhile, there was a conscious ideological emphasis on the overriding importance of family life.
The Nazi occupation of France had temporarily closed the Paris haute couture houses. Initialiy their wholesale removal to Berlin had been canvassed, but eventualiy they remained on French soil. Some of the top designers refused to work under the Nazis, but many worked on through the war with the aim of preserving the industry in French hands. Both French and German fashions during this period became more fussy, romantic and extravagant, and in fact laid the basis for the postwar "New Look".
At the end of the war Paris pulled out ali the stops to regain worldwide domination over the fashion industry. Its success had much to do with a massiye injection of funds into the industry by leading cloth industrialists - notably Marcel Boussac, the silk magnate, who put up the money for the new house of Christian Dior. In 1947 Dior took the Westem world by storm with his ultra-feminine "New Loak", which was alınost early Victorian: a tight-waisted, full-skirted romantic look.
There was an immense longing for this new extravagance in dressing. The New Look came to symbolize glamor, fun and luxury for women, who were tired of their drab wartime lives. Despite the Labour Government in Britain, which fulminated against this anti-egaIitarian "caged bird" style, and feminists in the United States who saw it as an attaek on the independence of American women, women flocked to the New Look. Dior's first great success laid the basis for the triumphant return of French haute couture.
France fought off the American attempt to become the world leader of fashion, and for the next 20 years was to continue to lead the field. The great French couture houses learned from the advanced methods of American ready-to-wear merchandising, while maintaining their exacting standards of hand craftsmanship and exclusivity, as they still kept their private clients and dressed the richest, most aristocratic and famous women in the world.
Although Dior pioneered new links \\ith the mass market and franchised his designs, Paris designers stili regarded themselves as true artists endowed with "genius", and a clear distinction was made between their exquisite individual creations and the general run of department-store fashion. In most of Europe, rniddleclass women still preferred to seek the services of a "littIe" dressmaker, who could copy the new lines from the grand houses - for the illusion of exclusivity was still a necessary part of the mystique of fashion, however widely styles might be copied, however popular they rnight become.
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1945 - 1960
Periods
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