Dior in Australia: the fashion house’s Australian connection
As a new exhibition celebrates 70 years of Christian Dior, Susan Horsburgh looks back at the thrilling early days of the design house and talks to Dior model June Dally-Watkins about its special relationship with Australia and The Weekly.
As Australia emerged from the dark, devastating days of World War II, women hungered for a return to normality. Better still, they wanted beauty and glamour – and they found it in fashion.
Tired of the boxy, masculine looks of the austere war years, Australian women turned to the salons of Paris for inspiration. At the same time, France was desperate for an economic recovery after four years of German occupation, keen to re-establish itself as the undisputed hub of haute couture.
Postwar Parisian designers rose to the occasion in spectacular style – none more so than Christian Dior – and so began the golden age of haute couture, characterised by wasp-waisted models in iconic, deeply feminine ensembles.
On August 27, the National Gallery of Victoria will present the never-before-seen exhibition The House of Dior: Seventy Years of Haute Couture, not only displaying the design house’s most memorable gowns, but also exploring its special affinity with Australia. Remarkably, the first complete Dior collection to be shown outside of Paris was paraded at David Jones in Sydney in 1948, and nine years later, just a month after his untimely death, the designer’s last collection was showcased in Australia in a series of parades sponsored by The Weekly featuring seven top Dior models flown in from France.
The 1957 parades marked the culmination of a decade-long relationship The Weekly had nurtured with Dior from the earliest days of the label, when Australian women reignited their love affair with French fashion. For The Weekly, fashion took a back seat during the war years, but in 1946 it appointed an elegant new Fashion Editor, Mary Hordern, a socialite, Francophile and sister-in-law of the magazine’s owner, Frank Packer. With her impeccable taste, Mary soon became a formidable authority on style, taking The Weekly’s glamour and fashion coverage to sophisticated new heights.
June Dally-Watkins, a top Sydney model at the time, still remembers going to lavish cocktail parties at Mary’s home – “truly enchanting evenings” where the cream of Sydney society “behaved with impeccable manners, wore black tie, full-length gowns and dined on French-inspired delicacies”.
Such was the obsession with all things French that Mary travelled to Paris in 1946 to organise the first of The Weekly’s four annual French Fashion Parades. After inspecting some 5000 designs from the leading couturiers – Jean Patou, Pierre Balmain and Edward Molyneux among them – Mary chose 120 fully accessorised ensembles that captured the essence of French style yet suited Australian life, and hand-picked four French mannequins (as models were known) to parade the clothes in department stores around the country. The inaugural gala event – at The Great Restaurant in Sydney’s David Jones in September 1946 – was the must-have ticket of the season and caused such a sensation that The Weekly staged three more French fashion extravaganzas, in 1947, ’48 and ’49. The parades were a coup for Australia and a PR masterstroke for The Weekly, which hit a circulation of 700,000 in 1946 (when the population was less than 7.5 million).
“The Women’s Weekly was big,” recalls June. “Everyone had to buy it.” Australian women flocked to The Weekly’s parades in Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Brisbane, and although they couldn’t buy the frocks on display, the host department stores had dressmakers churning out thousands of credible copies.
Just months after those groundbreaking parades, a then unknown French designer called Christian Dior launched his thrilling first collection in February 1947 to a standing ovation. Mary met with him in Paris, showcasing his designs in The Weekly’s French Fashion Parades later that year.
With his so-called New Look, Dior created a fresh silhouette, revolutionising fashion overnight and defining international haute couture for the next decade. Instantly, the contents of every woman’s wardrobe were seemingly obsolete. Dior did away with what he described as the “hideous and repellent” military styles that came with wartime fabric rationing, and brought back unbridled femininity. “I designed clothes for flower-like women,” Dior explained in his autobiography, “with rounded shoulders, full feminine busts and handspan waists above enormous spreading skirts.”
Dior was the name in Paris, Mary informed her readers. She included a black Dior cocktail dress in The Weekly’s French Fashion Parades that spring, and readers were treated to a pattern of it in the magazine so they could whip up their own versions at home.
Understanding the importance of new world markets – and that few Australians could visit Paris – Dior collaborated with David Jones in 1948, sending out 50 couture originals for a series of exclusive parades of his autumn-winter collection, first in Sydney, then around Australia. Speaking to The Sydney Morning Herald at the time, Dior declared that “living in the sunshine of a comparatively new country unscathed by war, Australians have a cleaner, brighter outlook and are more receptive to new ideas than the tired people of European countries”.
It was the first time a full Dior collection had been shown outside Paris, and mannequins had to have an 18-inch (or 45cm) waist. June DallyWatkins remembers exercising for weeks to whittle her already tiny waist down to the required size. When the auditions rolled around, June made the cut and strode the catwalk in “Dolly”, the collection’s signature gown made from 100 metres of white silk organza and 100 metres of white lace over tiers of ice-blue taffeta.
She still recalls the “perfection” of the Dior garments, their detailed embroidery and full skirts layered with petticoats to accentuate the waist. “The fashions were so exciting, they left the war behind us,” recalls 90-year-old June, who still runs her international finishing school. “They made people feel happy again – we wanted to look feminine and pretty as well as beautiful.”
The parades were staged in department stores over afternoon tea. “It was an elegant, glamorous thing for ladies to do – an afternoon out for them, even if they didn’t buy anything,” recalls June. “And they were all dressed incredibly well. Women had style in those days.” The onerous dress codes of the time only fuelled the intense interest in fashion. A welldressed woman required smart suits, dinner dresses and extravagant ball gowns, not to mention elegant accessories and complex, waistcinching underwear. A day outfit necessitated the appropriate shoes, gloves, hat and umbrella; cocktail dresses were for early evening, but not after 8pm; and a ball gown meant matching high heels and long white gloves.
It was arguably the most beautiful period in fashion, and The Weekly gave Australian women a new understanding and appreciation of it.
“By far the most important innovation is the absolute banishing of any kind of shoulder pad,” the magazine reported in 1948. “No matter what shape the shoulder, even the most sloping, it must be left in its natural state.”
Over the next decade, Dior frocks featured regularly in The Weekly’s fashion pages and Christian Dior himself identified Australia as the third most important market for French fashion after Paris and New York. Overseas buyers, usually from department stores, paid a surcharge of 40 to 50 per cent on each garment so they had the right to make copies, and they bought the designs without trying them on, often in the form of a toile or paper pattern. Paradoxically, although haute couture was traditionally an
“The fashions were so exciting, they left the war behind us.”
exclusive, bespoke business catering to wealthy private clients, Parisian design houses increasingly sold their garments to the mass market in the postwar period. In fact, Dior courted international buyers so successfully that by the time he died in 1957, his brand accounted for 5 per cent of France’s gross domestic product.
Mary Hordern ended her 11-year reign as Fashion Editor in 1957, but not before pulling off a final Christian Dior coup, organising The Weekly’s exclusive parades in Melbourne and Sydney of what would become his last collection. Dior died suddenly, aged 52, of a heart attack that October, but 83 of the designer’s exquisite creations were dispatched from Paris the next month and the Australian parades went on.
Seven of Dior’s house mannequins took a punishing 60-hour flight from France to model the designs and were feted like movie stars on arrival. The Weekly splashed the seven glamorous imports across its front page, providing a guide to each of the mannequins inside: Odile, it revealed, “plans tempting menus for her husband” in her spare time, while Dior’s favourite model, a Hollywood blonde named France, apparently “likes the good things of life – antiques, clothes, travel, parties and being admired”.
A decade on from Dior’s unveiling of the New Look, the 1957 parades reflected the changing moods of fashion, featuring his sumptuous signature evening gowns, but also a new day dress – the loose-fitting, unwaisted chemise – that was the polar opposite of his original fitted designs.
“The bosom is both exaggerated and ignored,” reported The Weekly, “the waist both fitted and bypassed.”
The chemise (or sack) was a younger, less formal alternative to his New Look designs, a harbinger of future styles that would take their cues from youth and popular culture.
Paris couture was about to lose its iron grip on international fashion, but Christian Dior had already secured his place as one of the most influential designers of the 20th century.
Indeed, the New Look continues to resonate 70 years on, proving perhaps that glamour and femininity will never go out of fashion. As Dior once said, “Deep in every heart slumbers a dream and the couturier knows it: every woman is a princess.” See many of the dresses from The Weekly’s parades in The House of Dior: Seventy Years of Haute Couture at the NGV, Melbourne, August 27 to November 7.