Maison Dior will always hold a special place in the Paris firmament. This is where the New Look, which referred to the romantic, hyper-feminine fin de siècle silhouettes Christian Dior remembered his mother wearing, was born. This structured, fabric-heavy hourglass shape, as Vogue noted when the house turned 10, “inadvertently launched a special postwar period for women.” Some, like the members of the Little Below the Knee Club, who preferred the shorter lengths wartime restrictions had allowed, entered this time kicking and screaming, but for many, Dior’s fashions became an amour fou.
Dior was 42 when he made his debut. Trained as a diplomat, he worked as a gallerist, prior to taking up illustration and design. Shy, but a man of exactitude, the designer compartmentalized his private self from his public one. “There are two Christian Diors,” he wrote in his 1956 memoir, Christian Dior & I. And the designing Dior, having a ravenous appetite for change, created a new silhouette each season.
The house’s most iconic look is the nipped-waist, full-skirted Bar suit from the Spring 1947 collection, but every six months Dior moved waist- and hemlines to come up with new lines like the A, H, Y, Tulip, et cetera. As Maria Grazia Chiuri, the seventh head of the house since Dior’s sudden death in 1957, and the first woman to hold the job, readies for her debut show, we pulled looks from each of the 22 collections (originally featured in Vogue) designed by Monsieur Dior, himself.
Spring 1947
“If there could be a composite, mythical woman dressed by a mythical, composite couturier,” wrote Vogue in the April 1, 1947, issue, “she would probably wear her skirt about 14 inches from the floor; it might have, for its working model a flower: petals of padding and stiffening seen beneath the cup of the skirt.” In other words, she’d be wearing the New Look silhouette introduced by Dior in his debut collection, the most iconic example of which is the Bar suit.
Photographed by Serge Balkin, Vogue, April 1947
Fall 1947
“Take last season’s round hipline, small shoulder, pulled-in waist, longer skirt, and emphasize each; stress the bosom, the derrière; add a side-moving hat . . .”
Illustrated by Eric, Vogue, October 1947
Spring 1948
The Envol Line: “The new ‘zigzag’ cut of Dior; a glove-close top, a skirt manipulated entirely at the back.”
Illustrated by Moles, Vogue, March 1948
Fall 1948
The Cloche: Left: “The wide flaring silhouette: The cloche. Gentle natural shoulders; lamp-shade draping; the cummerbund waistline. . . .” Right: Photographed in the gardens of the Grand Trianon, “Dior’s big satin dress, pearl-grey, stately, the extraordinary décolletage drapery slanted high above one shoulder, and balanced by a bow at the side-back; the skirt a sweeping fullness of doubly inverted pleats.”
Photographed by Clifford Coffin, Vogue, September 1948 (left); October 1948 (right)
Spring 1949
(Kangaroo) pockets and panels.
Photographed by Nepo, Vogue, March 1949
Fall 1949
The Blused Line: “An ample line, belted in, with soft bulk somewhere, either above or below the waist.”
Illustrated by René Bouché, Vogue, September 1949
Spring 1950
The Vertical Line: “Vertical is the new word.” Narrow works, too.
Illustrated by Eric, Vogue, March 1950
Fall 1950
The Oblique Line: “Wrapped, jutted, buttoned, slanting lines.”
Photographed by Irving Penn, Vogue, September 1950
Spring 1951
“Dior’s collection was his best since his first sensation. Dior, who gave the padded, pleated New Look its name, turned his back on all padding and stiffening, and only used pleats when they were clinging like fluted columns. He made carved oval dresses. . . .”
Photographed by John Rawlings, Vogue, March 1951
Fall 1951
The Long Line
Photographed by Henry Clarke, Vogue, September 1951
Spring 1952
“The waist is what catches the eye right away.”
Photographed by Horst P. Horst, Vogue, March 1952
Fall 1952
“Dior’s ‘Queen of Hearts’ profile follows the molded body line to the waist, with a stiff, standout skirt-yoke holding out the skirt. The shaped profile swells out from the molded waist to a lightly rounded back or side. . . . Perfection of construction and execution make Dior’s collection a strong fashion force.”
Photographed by Frances McLaughlin-Gill, Vogue, September 1952
Spring 1953
The Tulip Line: “It’s definite, now: Dior believes that a woman’s waist should be molded, her body silhouetted. His figurine figure of last season has crystallized this way—into a line that’s a slender, curving stalk for three-fourths of the way, and after that, at the top, a flowering of fullness. The comparison seems inevitable: it’s a tulip—and the exact reverse of Dior’s former tulip-line where the flare was at the hem.”
Photographed by Henry Clarke, Vogue, March 1953
Fall 1953
“. . . the hemlines that made the news was Dior’s—so short in some cases that it made its point dramatically but it was downright unwearable; just short enough in others (left and right) so that any woman with good legs and a strong appetite for fashion news will be tempted to try it.”
Illustrated by René Bouché, Vogue, September 1953
Spring 1954
“What do they do for relaxation, Dior’s new clothes? They just take everything a lot easier now. Jackets are shorter, more lenient; many are bloused. Skirts, even the straight ones, are far more livable. This is something of a millennium, this much ease from Dior. But one thing’s sure: It’s easier said than done.”
Photographed by Henry Clarke, Vogue, March 1954
Fall 1954
The H Line: “Even at Dior . . . the news is as much in the look as in the line. His sheathed bosom is actually an accessory to a new kind of femininity: subtler, not at all insistent, full of a charming reserve.”
Photographed by Clifford Coffin, Vogue, September 1954
Spring 1955
The A Line: “An ‘A’ set in the most beautiful fashion type—slender shoulders for the apex; sides slanting gently to the base, the hem.”
Photographed by Karen Radkai, Vogue, March 1955
Fall 1955
The Y Line: “Bulk above slimness.”
Photographed by Henry Clarke, Vogue, September 1955
Spring 1956
“A waistline that dawned (it’s very subtle) as almost the newsiest Spring line in Paris—the work of the jacket that Dior calls the ‘caraco.’”
Photographed by Henry Clarke, Vogue, March 1956
Fall 1956
“It came in, quiet as a mouse, at the Dior opening; left the room (and the world of fashion) buzzing. . . . Yes, the elegance is unquestioned. No, they’re not a fluke; the noticeably longer skirt is prophetic, perhaps for next spring, almost certainly for next autumn. Now? Experiment—inch by inch.”
Photographed by Frances McLaughlin-Gill, Vogue, September 1956
Spring 1957
The 7/8ths Length: “The continuous, flowing, soft line, shoes to hat.”
Photographed by Henry Clarke, Vogue, March 1957
Fall 1957
The unfitted dress . . . “masks the contours of the body with an ease as plotted as a compass reading.”
Photographed by William Klein, Vogue, September 1957
