Christian Dior 1950s – A Revolution of the Styles
Christian Dior 1950s design made his name in fashion history. The new look and new approach to fashion was a big post-war turning point in fashion history. After the war women wanted flippancy in dress and desired feminine clothes that did not look like a civilian version of a military uniform. It was a dramatic change from wartime austerity styles when Christian Dior 1950s collection presented a new look with a fitted jacket with a nipped in waist and full calf length skirt. A slender tunic suit with a slim skirt that later became more of a dropped waist tubular twenties style dress with a hemline that was creeping upwards. This would become a classic 1950s fashion garment.
Christian Dior 1950s collection was absolutely appropriate for the post-war era. Dior was correct in assuming that people wanted something new after years of war, cruelness and hardship. Dior’s collection suggested the long skirts, tiny waists and beautiful fabrics that his mother had worn in the early 1900s. Such a traditional concept of femininity also suited the political agenda. Women during the war had to work on farms and in factories while the men were away fighting. In peacetime those women were expected to return to passive roles as housewives and mothers, leaving their jobs free for the returning soldiers. The official paradigm of post-war womanhood was a capable, caring housewife who created a happy home for her husband and children.
Fashion history would never be the same again after Christian Dior 1950s had arrived. The Second World War left women longing for glamour, style and swathes of fabric where scraps of material had once existed. Dior’s full skirted and waist designs fulfilled all the early dreams of the feminine woman in the early 50′s. As a new, more liberated society evolved, women heading to more relaxed clothes and began to run away from the dress rules and associated formality of decades.
When teenagers became an emerging fashion voice and new consumer driven society was born. The fashionable age of being between thirty and forty at the start of 1950 was soon knocked off its pedestal before the end of the decade, by the arrival of the teenage cult with its own development of style and spending. Until then, 18 year old girls often dressed and made themselves up to look as old as their mothers.









