Fashion in 1950s-Dior’s New Look

In 1947, Christian Dior presented a fashion look with a fitted jacket with a nipped in waist and full calf length skirt.  It was a dramatic change from wartime austerity styles and named as New Look. Dior’s lavish use of material was a bold and shocking stroke. His style used yards and yards of fabric. The New Look collection violated all the rules of wartime fashion: his outfits had rounded shoulders; full, billowing skirts; and a narrow waist. The dresses were lined with expensive and luxurious fabrics such as cambric or taffeta and were beautifully detailed. Outfits were accessorized with a hat, often worn to one side, long gloves, and simple jewelry. As Valerie Steele wrote in Fifty Years of Fashion: New Look to Now: “The longing for elegance and luxury had been suppressed for the years of the war, and the New Look promised to gratify it.” As Dior described it when the clothing line was introduced, the New Look was “symbolic of youth and the future.”

Dior’s New Look clothes at that time were widely adorned by upper class people, but many critics scolded the designer for ignoring the continued rationing and the economic distress of the war years. They complained that manufacturers didn’t have enough cloth to make Dior’s full skirts and that women didn’t have enough money to buy them. One British politician claimed that the longer skirt was the “ridiculous whim of idle people,” while protestors in Paris called out, “40,000 francs for a dress and our children have no milk,” according to Nigel Cawthorne, author of The New Look: The Dior Revolution. But women and other designers disagreed. The first women to see the designs at Paris fashion shows raved that femininity had returned to women’s clothes. Designers imitated Dior’s look for their collections and quickly produced ready-to-wear New Look-inspired clothing lines. The New Look killed off the utility clothing of the war years and ushered in a new era in fashion. By 1948 the New Look was the dominant fashion in Paris, France; London, England; and New York, and it continued to be popular for several years.

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