Fashion as entertainment has expanded from the runway to the big screen and now the smaller one. While clothes play important supporting roles in Feud: Capote vs. the Swans, it is the main plot line in The New Look. The series takes its name from a silhouette that emerged from Christian Dior’s debut collection. Presented on February 12, 1947, in the midst of a positively Arctic winter, his curvy silhouette was an unparalleled success both on a symbolic level (it represented the rebirth of the French couture after the German occupation of World War II), and on a commercial one. “At the time of the ‘New Look’ an American journalist wrote that “M. Dior is the man who can lower forty million hems by lowering his pencil,” noted The New York Times. The New Look marked a turning point in fashion history and set the course for post-war fashion, although it was less novel than nostalgic. As Edna Woolman Chase, Vogue’s editor at the time, wrote in her memoir, Dior’s “clothes, while wearable, gave women the feeling of being charming costumed; there was a fairly romantic flavor about them.” After the austerity of the war years, they also represented a return to a decorative femininity. In the lead up to the fictional recreation of this event here is a primer on the revolutionary, and reactionary, New Look silhouette.
The New Look Is a Silhouette
In December 1946—less than two years after the Liberation of Paris—Christian Dior established his maison de couture with the backing of textile magnate Marcel “King of Cotton” Boussac and found instant success with his curvy New Look silhouette, which opposed straight lines with curvy ones, and replaced the boxy shoulders and short skirts necessitated by wartime restrictions with voluptuous ones requiring huge amounts of yardage. At the time, the designer wrote in his autobiography, “as a result of the war and uniforms, women still looked and dressed like Amazons. But I designed clothes for flower-like women, with rounded shoulders, full feminine busts, and hand-span waists above enormous spreading skirts.” Symbolically, the New Look represented a return to traditional, and decorative, ideas of femininity. Reflecting on the reaction to his first collection, Dior wrote, “I believe it was due to the fact that I brought back the neglected art of pleasing.”
Dior’s New Look Show Revived French Fashion
According to Vogue’s then-fashion editor Bettina Ballard, the New Look collection reframed the silhouette, as well as the presentation of clothes. Here’s her first person account of Dior’s debut from her memoir, In My Fashion. “Paris always takes its fashion news very seriously, and fashion since the war had been stale and tepid. Everyone hoped that Christian Dior could breathe life and some fire into this picture. […] Achieving my gold chair in the soft gray salon, the mantel mirror of which was decorated with a magnificent baroque garland of real flowers designed by Dior, I was conscious of an electric tension that I had never before felt in the couture. People who were not yet seated waved their cards in a frenzy of fear that something might cheat them of their rights. Suddenly all the confusion subsided, everyone was seated, and there was a moment of hush that made my skin prickle. The first girl came out, stepping fast, switching with a provocative swinging movement, whirling in the close-packed room, knocking over ashtrays with the strong flare of her pleated skirt, and bringing everyone to the edges of their seats in a desire not to miss a thread of this momentous occasion. After a few more of these costumes had passed, all at the same exciting tempo, the audience knew that Dior had created a new look and that Monsieur Boussac had made the safest gamble in fashion history. We were given a polished performance such as we had never seen in a couture house before. We were witness to a revolution in fashion and to a revolution in showing fashion as well.”
Christian Dior Didn’t Name His Line the New Look
Dior would become known for his ever changing silhouettes; he introduced two at his debut. “An Australian reporter, writing for Sydney’s Daily Telegraph, described the two “lines” introduced for spring 1947. “His line crystallizes what every other house has been trying to do with two new silhouettes—the ‘corolla’ (like an inverted carnation with a soft pleating skirt spreading out of a calyx-like bodice and slender hips) and ‘figure eight,’ which shows curving feminine bosoms linked up with curving feminine hips by a slender molded waist.” Indeed, for a 1986 Vogue article Carmen Baron, a former Dior employee, told reporter Joan Juliet Buck, “The flower woman was born.”
“La ligne corolle,” is what came to be known as the New Look, thanks, it is believed, to Carmel Snow, a Vogue alumna, who was then at Harper’s Bazaar. In A Dash of Daring, her biography of Snow, Penelope Rowlands recreated the moment: “ ‘God help the buyers who bought before they saw Dior!’ Carmel exclaimed, referring to the fact that many American buyers had already headed home. ‘This changes everything.’ And then or perhaps later, she said the words, ‘It’s quite a revolution, dear Christian. Your dresses have such a new look.’ ”
The “virality” of this phrase is corroborated by Ballard, who recorded the following anecdote: “After the opening some of us stayed and tried on the extraordinary new clothes, slightly punch drunk with the excitement of it all, whirling around in the knife-pleated skirts. […] Everyone insisted that I order the dress called ‘1947’ immediately, which, when I returned to New York, gave me a brief moment of fame. Even taxi drivers asked me, “Is this the ‘new look’?” so quickly did the expression become part of our everyday vocabulary.”
The New Look Wasn’t Actually a New Look
There is a phoenix-rising-from-the-ashes aspect to the New Look, which built upon pre-war ideas, and those that emerged in 1946. The last image photographer Horst P. Horst took for Vogue in Paris before fleeing Europe was a back view of a woman in a waist-defining corset by Mainbocher (the Chicago-born one-time editor of Paris Vogue who went on to dress many of New York society’s famous swans). The model’s laced silhouette has more in common with Édouard Manet’s painting Nana of 1877 than the uncorseted body introduced by Paul Poiret and Gabrielle Chanel before the First World War. Horst documented what looks like a literal return to form after a period of more relaxed and less restricted dressing. The nostalgic corseted silhouette provided the road map for the first post-World War II collections. Reporting on them in March 1946 Vogue wrote of “the slender silhouette” as a “symbol” that “was present in nearly every collection this spring because it is the silhouette of elegance…the elegance that answers a need in Paris hungry for almost everything.” The report from the October shows included the following observation: “Apparently all the great designers of the world are interested in some sort of back movement; in the tiniest possible waistline; in a new, feminine shaping of the shoulder; in non-exaggerated skirt-lengths—and in making women look beautiful.” All of those elements found their way into Dior’s collection the following year, and the magazine described the season’s “ “unforced femininity” as “a polished continuation of the rounded line that has been seen in Paris ever since the first post-Liberation collections.”
The New Look Appealed to Women of All Ages
The freshness of Dior’s debut was not limited to its lines, but, suggested Alison Settle, writing for The Guardian days after the show, its youthfulness, which is difficult to see at a distance of more than 75 years. “This new collection may be regarded as a microcosm of the fashions for tomorrow, for the silhouette launched there contains the major points which other Paris dress houses are trying to stress,” she wrote. “The main difference is that so many other creators design the vast majority of their clothes with the mature woman in mind, while here are supremely elegant clothes for the young woman, fashions which will quickly percolate (greatly modified for a simpler life) into the shops of most countries.” Dior wrote that he was pleased and surprised that, as he put it, “Saint-Germain des Près did not want to be left out.”
The New Look Was Bigger and Better
Speaking to Joan Juliet Buck for a 1986 Vogue article, Marc Bohan, who succeeded Yves Saint Laurent at Dior, weighed in on the New Look’s success: “What [Christian Dior] did was more. Tighter-at-the-waist wider skirts with more yardage—sometimes forty feet of fabric in a skirt—longer than anyone’s. If there were roses, they were bigger; a tulle dress was three times bigger than anyone else’s. The show was bigger, and there were more girls.”
The Naturalness of the New Look Was Actually Artifice
Not only was the appearance of the New Look nostalgic, but Dior revived and used what he called “long-forgotten techniques” such as hip padding and the use of linings of cambric and taffeta, in the construction of his garments, some of which were created by Pierre Cardin who worked on the New Look collection and later became a proponent of unisex and Space Age dressing. “An ethereal appearance is only achieved by elaborate workmanship; in order to satisfy my love of architecture, and clear-cut design, I wanted to employ quite a different technique in fashioning my clothes, from the methods then in use—I wanted them to be constructed like buildings,” he wrote in Dior by Dior. “My faiblesse,” he noted at the close of his book, as you will have guessed, is architecture which has fascinated me ever since I was a child. Prevented by my family and by my circumstances from ever gratifying this passion, I found an outlet for it in couture. I think of my work as ephemeral architecture, dedicated to the beauty of the female body.”
Not Everyone Loved the New Look
In Texas in August 1947 an irate Mrs. William J. Woodward formed The “Little-Above-the-Knee” club to protest Dior’s full and longer skirted styles for reasons relating to practicality, allure, aesthetics, and the economics of obsolescence. “The club has appealed to women who felt the desire to choose something other than what ‘grandmother wore,’ ” the UP noted. Fabric rationing was in effect in France and Britian through 1949 meaning that the New Look was mostly an export success. The idea of using 25 to 40 yards of fabric in a skirt was, depending how you looked at it, obscene in the face of continued need, or luxuriously extravagant fantasy.
The New Look Was About More Than Fashion
Timing is always important, but rarely more so than in the case of the New Look, which came on the heels of the horrendous and unimaginable occupation of Paris, the capital of fashion. Wrote Dior: “It happened that my own inclinations coincided ‘’ with the tendency of the times and thus attained added importance.” Thanks to the efforts of Lucien Lelong, Dior’s former employer (who attended Dior’s debut by the way), the Germans dropped their plans to move the couture out of the country. Dior’s debut was news in itself, his success became a symbol of French couture’s relevancy and revival. Looking at the extraordinary impact of the Corolla line from a distance of a decade, Vogue wrote: “In February, 1947, when Christian Dior first showed his now historic ‘new look,’ with its direct, unblushing plan to make women extravagantly, romantically, eyelash-battingly female, he inadvertently launched a special postwar world for women. That’s what we all talked about then—the postwar world, which seemed to arrive by fits and starts. And while the new cars and nylons and automatic washing machines filled it with patches of green pastures, the real Elysian lift—the smirky, cat-in-cream thing that happens to women in front of mirrors—came out of Dior and Paris. At the precise gray moment in time when the fashion business was hinting at the decline of French couture, suddenly one of its own, namely Dior, stirred up a most reviving fuss.” Dior’s clothes, which were voluptuous in their abundance of material, were seen as optimistic, hopeful, and fantastical. The designer Valentina, a client of the house, summed things upped nicely when speaking to Buck in 1986: “Once in a while, someone makes an impact by reaffirming certain deep needs and desires. The war had been poverty, misery, fear, terror, and death. Dior’s collection was an expression of joie de vivre; it was refinement and luxury, and it brought back dreams.”