Dior unveils the ‘New Look’

The fashion house throws austerity out of the window to create an era-defining style

The date was 12 February 1947, the place the headquarters of the Christian Dior fashion house at 30 Avenue Montaigne, Paris. Having just launched his own house, the eponymous Dior was desperate to make a splash. After years of wartime austerity, he thought, fashion badly needed a dash of glamour, turning its back on the privations of the last decade.

Instead of the boxy silhouettes so popular in the early 1940s, Dior’s outfits were voluptuous and curvaceous, with boned, busty bodices, tiny waists and long, wide, sweeping skirts. Given the pinched feel of the last few years, the effect could hardly have been more spectacular. Dior himself boasted that he had “designed flower women”, and the collection was entitled Corolle, meaning a circlet of flower petals.

When Dior’s models walked out, some of the fashion journalists gasped. “It’s such a new look!” exclaimed the editor of Harper’s Bazaar, Carmel Snow. From that moment, Dior’s style became known as the New Look. Some women complained because the long dresses covered up their legs, and some commentators thought it unforgivably wasteful to spend so much money on fabric at a time when much of Europe, including France itself, was in ruins.

But Dior had accurately judged the mood. Ordinary consumers were desperate for some romantic escapism, and the self-consciously elegant New Look set the tone, on both sides of the Atlantic, until well into the 1950s. Not everybody liked it, though. “Only a man who never was intimate with a woman,” sniffed Coco Chanel, “could design something that uncomfortable.”