Explore Dior's first decade at the Mccord Museum
Mccord Museum showcases creations from the Paris fashion house's crucial first decade
It's strange to think there was a time, not terribly long ago, when Paris looked to have lost its mode mojo.
In the 1940s, as Europe slowly emerged from the trauma of the Second World War, the fashion industry with which the French capital was once synonymous remained in the doldrums, hamstrung by the lingering effects of rationing and general malaise. But soon that was to change dramatically through the efforts of one man.
Christian Dior was an unassuming-looking figure who was in his early 40s when in 1947 he founded the house that bore his name; he died of a heart attack a mere 10 years later. In that decade, it's fair to say he revolutionized fashion and relaunched an industry.
It's an epoch done full justice at the Mccord Museum in Christian Dior, an immersive multimedia exhibition featuring more than 50 garments and many more accessories from the crucial decade when Dior was alive and running his house. Produced by the Royal Ontario Museum and now on view in Montreal as part of a national tour, it's a show that makes a case for its subject as one of the most influential people of the 20th century and beyond.
“His name became synonymous with everything Parisian couture represented — the design, the luxury, the tastemaker personality, the widespread licensing and clever marketing of his products,” said Cynthia Cooper, head of collections and research and curator of dress, fashion and textiles at the Mccord.
Some of the facts defy belief. At one point in the 1950s, for example, Dior exports accounted for five per cent of France's total exports.
“Christian Dior had an exceptional grasp of what was needed at the time,” Cooper said. “At a moment when the world was emerging from a wartime ethos, he knew design-wise what would appeal to women — a radical change in their wardrobe using a whole lot more fabric than they had seen in the preceding years. He also had the business acumen to line up his backers and relaunch all the skilled trades in France that could cater to the luxury that he was incorporating into his garments. He had a very acute sense of what would signal a change in the times.”
What quickly came to be known as the New Look was, in Cooper's description, “an hourglass shape, with a very tightly fitted upper bodice — in some dresses even using corsetry techniques which had long since been abandoned, to make the dresses fit closer to the body, along with long, full skirts that used metres and metres of fabrics. Of course, with wartime rationing, that was something that couldn't have been done. The fashions during wartime tended to skirts just below the knee that were often quite narrow and fitted, and Dior proposed a silhouette with very full gathered or pleated skirts that fell to mid-calf or below. It represented a total contrast to what women's wardrobes had been.”
An irony of Dior's phenomenal success, of course, is that an esthetic that became a byword for modern actually hearkened back to a much earlier era.
“The Dior esthetic was really inspired by 19th-century silhouettes,” Cooper said. “Something the world had quite happily rejected around the time of the First World War as women moved toward looser-fitting garments that allowed more freedom of movement. That earlier ethos had been long since left behind (by the 1940s), so one can imagine that, coming out of a crisis, people were quite ready to accept something that evoked a certain nostalgia for a time when the esthetic experience of clothing seemed more important than comfort.”
Dior was no less a visionary with what we now call branding, licensing the Dior name and collaborating with manufacturers to make a wide range of accessories, many of which penetrated global markets in ways the dresses never could.
“Perfumes, especially, expanded his market greatly,” Cooper commented. “If one couldn't afford a Dior dress, one might be able to afford the perfume.”
The exhibition has local connections that may surprise some.
“Montreal loved Dior,” Cooper said. “When his first collection came out in 1947, Henry Morgan — which is today the Bay — brought over a few pieces and showed them in fashion shows at Morgan's that same year. Dior himself was here in the fall of 1947 to promote his collections and products. In 1951 Holt Renfrew signed a licensing agreement with Dior, and through the '50s, '60s and even into the '70s, in a workroom at Holt Renfrew, Montreal produced haute couture garments, line-for-line copies, in the same fabrics, using the same patterns and techniques as the couture house in Paris, for Canadians. We were making licensed Dior right here.”
The Montreal presence is felt in four gowns donated by the late socialite Margaret Rawlings Hart, and by three new dresses made from original Dior patterns by Haitian-born Montreal designer Helmer Joseph.