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September 21, 2007 9:41 am
In fashion terms, the decade that spanned the New Look to the death of its creator, Christian Dior (1947 to 1957) was one of the high points of the twentieth century. With the war over, fashion bloomed again, in a renaissance that launched the careers of some of the greatest names in design, including Dior himself, Jacques Fath, and Hubert de Givenchy.
The era gets its due in The Golden Age of Couture:
Paris and London 1947-1957, an exhibit that opens at the Victoria and Albert Museum tomorrow (the accompanying book will be published in the U.S. by Harry N. Abrams). With the current fashion season in full swing, we had a few questions for curator Claire Wilcox.
Everyone associates couture with Paris, but the exhibit encompasses London as well. What was going on there?
London couldn’t compete with Paris in terms of chicness, but it did have couture houses such as Hardy Amies, Norman Hartnell, Digby Morton, Michael of London. They were known for their tailoring and for their presentation gowns, the sort of dresses you’d wear at court. North Americans would go to Paris to buy clothes, but they’d nip over to London to buy a tailored suit.
The show explores the way the French designers, who had a lot of respect for their colleagues in London, infiltrated the city. Dior, for example, opened a branch here and showed his clothes to the queen and the two princesses, who were all fans of the New Look.
But the New Look met with a lot of resistance, especially in the U.K.
A lot of people disapproved of the New Look when it came out in 1947. In London it was seen as insulting to use loads of fabric when people were suffering deprivation. In Paris, however, it was felt that it stimulated trade. And there was a huge desire for feminine fashions after the war.
It was the era of the fashion designer as dictator, dropping or raising hemlines at will. Is that a pretty fair assessment?
Fashion designers could really decide what women wore then. There was a lot less choice. Women had fewer clothes and they wore them more. When the New Look came out, it made everything that came before look passé. Woman went to their dressmakers and had them take in the waists of their dresses and let down the hems so they could look up-to-date.
People altered their clothes much more. The suits in the show have been altered many, many times to keep up with changes in fashion.
How did the couture of those years differ from the couture of today?
It was in some ways more accessible then. Suits were reasonably affordable; if you saved up, you could buy one. Women would buy one couture suit and several ready-to-wear blouses, for example. Today the couture serves a different purpose which is to say it doesn’t have a practical purpose. People who wear couture now don’t really have to worry about mixing in items from Gap.
Ready-to-wear. Couturiers started doing ready-to-wear collections in the late 1950’s to combat copying. But it took on a life of its own once youth culture took off. People had a lot more choices. No fashion designer today has the power that Christian Dior had. —Nancy MacDonell
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