Getting back to non-basics
Vicki Woods
CHRISTIAN DIOR: THE MAN WHO MADE THE WORLD LOOK NEW by Marie-France Pochna Aurum, £18.95, pp. 314 Somebody had to make the world look new. For seven years, the women who kept the home fires burning had put all foolish thought of fashion aside: there was little time or inclination to wonder whether airforce blue might be the new khaki when you were digging for victory in Land Army corduroys. But by the bitter February of 1947 women were sick unto death of aus- terity and uniformity and practicality and Utility and knitting up skimpy cardigans out of old boiled jumpers. A vast market of drearily dressed women longed for change. Somebody had to provide it. The lucky somebody might have been British or (more likely) American, since both these nations were eager to break the traditional Parisian armlock on world fashion. Marie- France Pochna's detailed biography of Christian Dior analyses the combination of talent, timing and great buckets full of good fortune that meant the lucky some- body was French.
Dior was unbelievably superstitious: worried about broken mirrors and unlucky numbers, had a lucky colour (red), carried lucky charms, could not make a decision without his clairvoyant. He needed his luck: he was the unlikeliest smash-hit fashion designer ever. His father made fertilisers in Normandy (the townsfolk would say 'It smells of Dior' when the wind was in the wrong direction, and they did not mean rose de chene). His mother was an austere, snobbish, distant woman who would have hated to see her son's name over a shop, and he did not find his life's direction until both were dead. He was an arty dilettante for most of his life and a homosexual (neither of which ham- pers a fashion career), but he was also provincial, bourgeois, shy, unhandsome, fretful, fussy, anglophile, middle-aged and running to fat. At his debut he was 42.
He was lucky in his timing: he finally dis- covered his métier just before the war. Most of the fashion houses remained open during the Occupation, providing wealthy South Americans and the new-rich French BOF wives (beurre-oeufs-fromage black- marketeers) with the sorts of things they liked. While ideas were stagnant, sales were brisk and Dior had time to learn his trade, working first for Piguet and then for Lelong. He was lucky in his backer, Marcel Boussac, a millionaire textiles magnate, who wanted to move into high fashion. You cannot make fashion without textiles. Dior (on the advice of his clairvoyant) persuaded Boussac to open a brand-new House of Dior rather than reinvigorate an existing one. He insisted that French couture would have to return to its traditions of great luxury, and told Boussac he would make gowns of apparent simplicity but using the most elaborate workmanship. Boussac, faced with a man who had barely had a proper job in his life, agreed.
No one was expecting the Paris Collec- tions of 1947 to be vintage. The freezing city, barely recovered from war, was ridden by shortages and strikes. Dior's show was the last of the fortnight and most of the buyers for the big American fashion stores had already left for the New York boat. The audience was mainly the American press (Britain was more or less bankrupt by 1947 and not in the market for Paris couture; the French newspapers were all on strike). The Americans queued for this show in their mink coats, skimpy skirts, wedge heels and mannish suits. They were seated in a lavishly appointed salon banked with delphiniums and sweet peas and heavy with a new scent, Miss Dior. They watched a polished theatrical performance — the first modern, swift-moving fashion show. The first model swept out in a calf-length, silk- lined, finely-pleated and narrow-waisted skirt made from 20 yards of fabric. It flew open like the petals of a flower and knocked the ash off the front-row cigarettes. (Fashion editors in 1947 smoked as much as they do now, but they were allowed to do it in the salons then, instead of only in the street outside.) The audience was excited by the radical change of silhouette and dazzled by the opulent, lavish, careless generosity of fabric. When the last model disappeared, the editor of American Vogue compared Dior to Napoleon and Alexander the Great and the editor of Harpers Bazaar said Dior had `Why Miss Dunbar, you're beautiful!' saved Paris as Paris had been saved by the battle of the Marne. A Reuters journalist .tossed a note down to her contact in the street outside; wires hummed, headlines were written, boats turned back, Olivia de Havilland and Rita Hayworth flew in, and every woman in America wanted the New Look. Britain huffed about the lavish waste of material (one of the lined and stuffed and padded evening dresses famously weighed 60 lbs) and puffed about patriotism (Picture Post's headline was, `Paris forgets this is 1947') but Nancy Mitford sold her fur for a New Look coat, and hip little Princess Margaret Rose prepared to defy George VI for a Dior gown.
Curiously, while he made the world look new, he did not make the world look modern. Modern is movement and freedom and no corsets: Chanel was modern in her demand for ease of movement and mannish comfort. Dior's constricting, ultra- feminised fashions took a retrograde step into Victorian-style waspies and padding. He restructured the female figure with shaping over the bust and hips and exaggerated tight lacing at the waist. A client, complimented on her new dress, said eagerly that yes, it was marvellous, adding, 'I can't walk, eat, or even sit down.' (Though one Parisian client said, 'We were all thin to start with. None of us had eaten for four years.') I suppose women just did not want to look modern immediately after the war. Rosie the Riveter was desperate to clamber out of her blokey dungarees and into a womanly whirl of silk-lined pleating.
By luck and by judgment Christian Dior had captured Pair du temps, and the New Look sold and sold. The upmarket bought it, the mass-market copied it, and Dior's shrewd business manager Jacques Rouet capitalised on it to such an effect that by 1949, 75 per cent of all French fashion exports carried the Dior label, and Dior had five per cent of the total volume of French exports. Paris's pre-eminence in fashion was restored (until Milan took it away in the Eighties) and for the ten years of life remaining to him Dior worked frenziedly to build a fashion empire on a vast scale, licensing scent, hats, jewellery, cosmetics, shoes, furs, men's ties. He was barely restrained from licensing a Dior ham.
Pochna's biography was written in French and translated for Americans (favorite, color, theater, mustache, one hundred twenty francs). The greenery-yallery prose is peppered with exclamation marks, and some of her imaginative flights could do with a brisk hose-down. But she has researched her subject tenaciously and her analysis of Dior's life-work is authoritative and unarguable. She appears to have inter- viewed everyone she could (though not Yves Saint Laurent, once Dior's pupil; I expect he refused her). Pochna did interview Princess Margaret, though sadly the entirety of their conversations has been boiled down to one tiny anecdote: as Dior was discussing the embroidery for her 21st- birthday gown, he asked, 'Does Your.Royal Highness feel like a gold person or a silver one?' A gold person.' `C tout' — but there is not a woman in the world who would not want more: what size gold person? How big a waist?
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