My piece on Dior is in the Telegraph today:
A snapshot of Christian Dior's plump face frozen in fright just before the first model girl sashayed on to his salon floor on 16 February 1947 shows the very moment that fashion history was about to be made. It is not always easy to pin down when something decisively changes, but Dior's first collection was one of those occasions when we can put a date and a place to a total alteration in fashion consciousness. The women in the audience at that first show sat on their gilt chairs dressed in square-shouldered, wartime suits with skimpy skirts. Five days later Nancy Mitford would write to her sister Diana Mosley that her life had been made a desert of gloom, for now all her clothes had been rendered, at a stroke, unwearable. She just had to have one of the new dresses with their tiny waists, narrow sloping shoulders and pavement-skimming skirts. Customers, she wrote, were fighting over them, and it was like a scene at a bargain-basement sale just trying to place an order.
Read on
1 comment:
As one might determine from my avatar, I remain enamored of the New Look look. Back in my 20's during one of the periods when I'd been able to starve myself down to a twig, I purchased a vintage dress in this style. It was so magical I hung onto it for almost 30 years, even though I was only able to fit into it for a few short months. It was emerald green satin (sigh).
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