To begin to answer this question, it is important to understand the circumstances surrounding Dior’s ascent. After a brief career as a gallerist, Dior worked at several major haute couture fashion houses in Paris, most famously that of Lucien Lelong. While couture production slowed greatly during World War Two, with most producers closing, Lelong’s house remained open, and Dior was employed there between 1941 and 1946. Working as one of the designers—for Lelong himself did not produce the designs—Dior came to the notice of a cross-section of elite Parisian women.

The reputation that Dior accrued during his time at Lelong was indispensable in drawing attention to the launch of his own label and design house in February 1946. The house was packed for the showing of his first collections; archival photographs show the space so jammed that patrons were obliged to sit on the stairs. Among those in attendance was Carmel Snow, the Editor-in-Chief of the US edition of Harper’s Bazaar, who is said to have exclaimed that the designs on show constituted a “new look”—and New Look became the universal shorthand for Dior’s style.

In reality, what Dior showed at his debut were two dress collections—named Corolle and Envol—that were much more complex than the words New Look ever belied. The silhouettes featured in these lines drew on earlier models of fashionable femininity, and were unmistakably, though imprecisely, historical. Though Dior has been called—and intermittently presented himself as—a “revolutionary,” which implies a will to the new, his designs derived their revolutionary force from their reclaiming of the past. This was work that turned away from the present.

Considering the post-World War II context of Dior’s emergence, this revolutionary turn toward the past is not surprising. Dior’s debut took place a mere eighteen months after the liberation of Paris, which triggered the end of the Nazi occupation of France. In this immediate post-Occupation period, the country was still in the grip of the war’s trauma. Dior’s work is symptomatic of this national mood. As he wrote in his autobiography, “[i]n December 1946, as a result of the war and uniforms, women still looked and dressed like Amazons. But I designed clothes for flower-like women…”[1] The silhouettes he introduced were characterized by extremely small waists, very full skirts, and long hemlines that fell almost to the ankle, making them radically different from the spare, practical, relatively short-skirted fashions of wartime (Figure 2).

In effect, Dior materialized a longing for a nebulous pre-war (even pre-World War I) past through his designs. Alexandra Palmer has written, “Dior’s exaggerated feminine perfection appealed because it helped to eradicate the memory and actions of all men and women during the war.”[2] His work can thus be understood as classically nostalgic. Nostalgia is a hybrid orientation to the world: rather than representing a pure past, it is a turn to the past occasioned by the circumstances of the present. It is a clash of times.[3] Dior’s work uniquely indexed the character of French national nostalgia in the postwar years, installing an aesthetic of femininity that recalled the years of apparent French glory from the eighteenth century to the eve of World War I.[4] In France, this might be seen as a variation on the long tradition of explicitly expressing the French nation through the body of a woman, Marianne.[5] Dior’s designs were strongly linked to a nationalism that glorified French aesthetic exceptionalism and sophistication.

Dior’s relationship with his models was similarly close. “Fortunately,” he wrote in 1957, “the couturier has access to the best lawyers in the world: his models. Each time he prepares to give them the floor…he hopes that their elegance will win him the leniency of the jury.”^[8] This was a striking concession of power to women who were typically seen as objects, not subjects. Notwithstanding Dior’s warm feeling toward his models, their figuration in his shows and promotional photography was notably static and distant. In modeling for Dior, they became absent. An early and rare academic commentary on Dior by a critic named Rémy Saisselin in 1959 suggested that Dior’s work was based on the extreme aestheticization of the dressed woman’s body, so that “woman has become style.”[9] Saisselin further wrote, “[w]oman has become an abstract creature made for the contemplation of the intellect.”[10] Set against the empathic and relational tone of Dior’s descriptions of his work with collaborators and models, such an approach is striking, and suggests that the overwhelmingly visual culture of fashion ultimately trumped the complex and dynamic relationships behind the scenes. In this sense, Dior crystallized a wider tension in modern fashion, whereby much of the richness—material, relational, textual—surrounding fashion is stripped away in its visual mediation.

The suggestion that the New Look was merely a recycling of older styles is intriguing as well. The protest in Dallas used creative means to make this point. As the New York Times reported, “[w]ith a band playing old-time songs and half its members dressed in grandmother’s clothes, members of the Little Below the Knee Club stopped downtown traffic here today with a parade proclaiming long skirts old-fashioned and impractical.”[15] An image from that event shows a protester in historical pastiche—the dress is in the style of the early 1920s, and the bonnet evokes the mid-nineteenth century. These women were wary of being symbolically thrown back into a period before the war. The war, after all, was a time in the US and other countries that saw unprecedented labour force participation for white women of the working and middle classes, and the freedoms that came with it. These included sexual freedoms, and this may have been on the mind of some of the women protesting. We see some evidence of this in a photograph of a California protest against Dior’s longer hemlines, where protesters wore bathing suits as they picketed. The sign in the foreground, asking “Do We Need Padding?” referenced the padded skirts that were a key feature of the New Look. Taking a stand in response to being encased in clothes, these women saw the new mode as a retrenchment of prewar sexual mores.