The golden age of couture Paris and London, 1947-57

LET'S start, fashion lovers, with aquiz. When you hear the word "bar," your first thought is of: (a) Leonardo DiCaprio's supermodel girlfriend, Bar Refa-A eli; (b) that place you stumble into when you've been wearing your teetering Yves Saint Laurent platforms for too long and only alcohol will dull the pain; or (c) the wasp-waisted skirt-suit that, in 1947, formed part of Christian Dior's trailblazing "New Look" in women's clothing. Obviously, there is a time and place for both (a) and (b). But those who answered (c) score bonus points for knowing that with confections like the "Bar" suit, Dior helped make high fashion what it is today: at once a bonanza of glossy worldwide press coverage and an artful, gloriously improbable celebration of the female form. Edited by Claire Wilcox, the curator of the exhibit of the same name currently on view at London's Victoria and Albert Museum, THE GOLDEN AGE OF COUTURE: Paris and London 1947-57 (V&A Publications/Abrams, $45) offers an illuminating and sumptuously illustrated look at the renaissance in French fashion that occurred in the decade following World War II. As Wilcox and the book's other contributors emphasize, the war years were a bleak time for couture, the prestigious Parisian industry that, since 1858, had turned out hand-crafted, custom-made garments for an elite clientele. From fabric rations and supply shortages to the evaporation of important export markets abroad, and from the rise of utilitarian, military-inspired styles to the closing of several revered fashion houses (e.g., Chanel, which closed its doors in 1939), the grim realities of the war had, by the time of Paris's liberation, taken their toll on la mode francaise. This development caused great anxiety among the French, for whom haute couture had long been a matter of national pride and who recoiled to think that America, with its newfound prosperity and industrial power, might unseat their capital as the world's arbiter of style. Enter Christian Dior (1905-57), a visionary couturier who opened his own fashion house in 1946 and breathed new life into the luxury trade. "In December 1946," he remembered afterward, "as a result of the war and uniforms, women still looked and dressed like Amazons. I designed clothes for flowerlike women, with rounded shoulders, full feminine busts and hand-span waists above enormous spreading skirts." The impact of his debut collection - which Dior named Corolle, to evoke a ring of flower petals, but which the fashion editor Carmel Snow promptly baptized the "New Look" - was immediate and far-reaching. Almost overnight, this look became the new standard, both in Paris and around the globe. (The book emphasizes in particular Dior's influence in London, but this is driven principally by the Victoria and Albert Museum's Anglocentric collection, and thus loses some interest outside the context of the actual exhibition.) Women everywhere, it seemed, were ready to abandon the austerity of wartime for the French master's voluptuous hourglass silhouette, even if that meant reclaiming the tight girdles, underwired bodices, padded bustles and voluminous petticoats from which designers like Paul Poiret and Coco Chanel had "liberated" them several decades before. Indeed, as Wilcox rightly observes, "the attraction and paradox" of the New Look was that although it "established a modern identity for couture between 1947 and 1957, its practice and philosophy were rooted in the past." Dior and his imitators "nurtured a predilection for 19th-century touches, using fabric knots, fringed bows and artificial flowers as finishing touches on garments of stiff taffeta, duchesse satin and wool, which were as firmly structured as those of Worth, the founder of haute couture." Aesthetically and technically, these corseted, crinolined dresses harked back to an earlier era, when clothes, in Dior's words, were "constructed like buildings" and en cased their wearers in structured, hyper-feminine shapes that flappers and Fascists alike had threatened to destroy for good. The fact that the designer himself called his postwar heyday the "golden age" of couture attests to the nostalgia that informed his work. But Dior was no retrograde - far from it. Wilcox notes that he was "as astute commercially as he was artistically," and he formed innovative partnerships witft suppliers, receiving the financing for his business from a textile manufacturer. He also revolutionized distribution channels, creating affordable copies of his designs for sale in American department stores and setting up his own ready-to-wear boutiques around the world. In these ways, he profitably brought "the skill and fantasy" of French couture to a mass market. To expand his business still further, Dior cultivated fashion journalists anfi photographers, "making it possible," one American editor recalled, "for pictures of Dior clothes to be the best and most plentiful in the press." Although some of his rivals (most notably Cristobal Balenciaga) shunned the news media, presumably on the grounds that the widespread diffusion of their designs would undermine their rarefied appeal, Dior sought press attention because, as he put it simply, "the picture of a dress in a magazine can inspire a woman to buy it." Like Bernard Arnault, whose LVMH conglomerate now owns the House of Dior, the couturier understood that the fashion trade involves not just creating beauty, but also selling it. In his commercial practices if not in his designs, the man with a penchant for old-school craftsmanship and traditional, womanly forms looked to the future, not to the past. In so doing, Dior established Paris fashion as an indomitable force in the international luxury market and Paris chic as a commodity for which women the world over will still pay just about any price. CAROLINE WEBER