![Christian dior](https://loka.nahovitsyn.com/221.jpg)
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His low necks were so low that they barely stopped at the waist. His narrow waists became as much as 2 inches narrower by means of specially installed corsets. "I'm a mild man," Dior says, "but I have violent tastes." Violent tastes were precisely what the situation demanded. He returned from his lonely vigil, his pockets stuffed with 300 designs scrawled on odd bits of paper.
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When the setting was ready, Dior retired to his little country house near Fontainbleau and meditated for a week. For four months 85 decorators and painters labored to produce an atmosphere of discreet elegance unequaled in any existing Paris salon de couture. He plunged lavishly, staking everything on a single throw. About a year and a half ago, with backing from a French gambler and millionaire named Marcel Boussac, he left a job as one of Lucien Lelong's numerous assistants to open his own dress shop a fine old mansion on the Avenue Montaigne, a few steps away from the Champs Elysées. He also senses that the time was exactly ripe to convert these minority manifestations into a powerful mass movement.Īlthough scarcely anyone had ever heard of him before last year, Christian Dior had been a minor league figure in Paris dress business, on and off, since 1936. If this longer skirt length looks right to you, you're a woman of the future.' Dior senses this situation ('I know very well the women'). In 1941 Harper's Bazaar solemnly warned its readers: 'Watch your skirt length. As far back as the late 1930s Martha Graham's modern ballet troupe was wearing the knee-covering, bosom-exposing garments currently featured as the New Looks. But he appeared at the psychological moment as its man on plush horseback. He did not create the New Look single-handed. Like all great revolutionists, Christian Dior is a creature of destiny. Here, not only offers a glimpse back at a seminal moment in fashion history, but presents pictures-some that appeared in the magazine, many that were never published-by some of LIFE’s finest photographers, taken at a Dior show in Paris in 1948, when the New Look was all the rage and a timid, middle-aged, insignificant-looking little Frenchman astonished and thrilled the couture world.īelow is an abridged version of the article that ran in the March 1, 1948, issue of LIFE, beneath the one-word headline: DIOR.
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The monsieur in question was none other than (in writer Jeanne Perkins marvelous characterization) “a timid, middle-aged, insignificant-looking little Frenchman named Christian Dior,” and the fashion earthquake he unleashed was something called, simply and unforgettably, the New Look. In March 1948, LIFE introduced its readers to a pioneering French fashion designer and what the magazine called his “revolutionary” vision.
![Christian dior](https://loka.nahovitsyn.com/221.jpg)