In a pearl grey, upholstered, perfumed room in Paris’ Avenue Montaigne, the buyers broke into a storm of bravos. Soon the news was pouring out to a waiting world: “Christian Dior today dropped the waistline to the hips, flattened the bust and sent women’s fashions back to the Jazz Age of the 1920s . . . Dior has abolished bosoms.”
It was the biggest fashion change since the time seven years ago when the same Christian Dior decreed the “New Look.” The news was calculated to alarm housewives, delight dress merchants and throw husbands into mumbling despondency. For no amount of patching, mending or letting out, trimming, tacking or tucking, no gusset, gore, or gather could make last year’s dress into this fall’s Dior mode. In upstairs closets from Spokane to Athens, Copenhagen to Rome, millions of dresses would suddenly become “that old thing,” their value destroyed with a swiftness and efficiency that no moth could hope to match.
From the dress and fashion industry’s point of view, such a state of affairs was ideal. Cried Ohrbach’s Sydney Gittler triumphantly: “The new simple lines are here for keeps.”
Downward Sliding. Dior’s dresses were straight and flat in front, straight and flat behind. They dropped undisturbed from narrow sloping shoulders, passed the waist without a flicker of recognition and settled just south of the bottom. Belts sagged low around the haunch, embracing a girl where there is most to embrace. The plunging neckline, an enticing vista down which men had been peering happily for years, was firmly closed over by featureless cloth. Even evening dresses hovered near the collar bone. Fashion editors burbled of “straight, flat pullovers,” “oldfashioned middy blouses.”
If some U.S. editors still clung to their skepticism, they lost it next day when Jacques Fath followed with his own version of “the boyish look” and the “downward-sliding silhouette.” His models walked with their weight thrown back on their heels to suppress bosoms and accentuate their southering belts. There was no blinking it: it was the “debutante slouch” of the ’20s. Could beaded dresses, long cigarette holders and the shrill laugh be far behind?
One tall, bosomy Fath model was roundly applauded each time she appeared. “But it was as if the crowd was making a last stand and already knew it was licked,” admitted the New York Herald Tribune’s Eugenia Sheppard.
Cries of outrage swelled into a chorus in the U.S. press, aided by Hollywood’s alert pressagents, out to defend their clients’ stock in trade: “I am not built for any kind of boy’s fashions, so why should I wear them?” said Mrs. Joe DiMaggio. TV’s robustious Dagmar went on record: “Frankly, honey, the instrument hasn’t been made that can flatten me out.” Growled Marlon Brando ungallantly: “Emphasizing women’s hips is like putting falsies on a cow.”
Reporters from coast to coast swarmed into the streets to interview well-rounded young women. They were scornful and suspicious. “Any girl who goes for this flat look should have her chest examined,” said one. Headline writers plugged away: DIOR’S FLAT PROPOSALS LIKELY TO ESTRANGE BOSOM FRIENDS; DIOR WILL NEVER CRUSH U.S. WOMANHOOD; FILM BEAUTIES FIT TO BUST AT DIOR DEFLATION POLICY.
Brainwashing. But designers were not so certain that the defiance would hold up. At the very least, what had been artificially cinched up and built out would henceforth be slacked off and subdued, they guessed. Pope Benedict had denounced the 1920 look as indecent. Last week the worry seemed to be that it was so decent that it might affect the birth rate. Despite worry, protest and outright defiance, the ladies would probably do just as they were told. They always had. Designers developed their own brand of brainwashing long ago, and they know just how to go about it.
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