Spring/Summer 1954 Christian Dior Silk Ball Gown
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Spring/Summer 1954 Christian Dior Silk Ball Gown
About the Item
RARE vintage
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- Designer:
- Brand:
- Dimensions:Marked Size: 4 (US)
- Place of Origin:
- Period:
- Condition:Excellent.
- Seller Location:New York, NY
- Reference Number:1stDibs: AU12022743766
Christian Dior
When Christian Dior launched his couture house, in 1946, he wanted nothing less than to make “an elegant woman more beautiful and a beautiful woman more elegant.” He succeeded, and in doing so the visionary designer altered the landscape of 20th century fashion.
Dior was born in Granville, on the Normandy coast, in 1905. His prosperous haute bourgeois parents wanted him to become a diplomat despite his interest in art and architecture. However, they agreed to bankroll an art gallery, which Dior opened in 1928 in Paris with a friend.
This was the start of Dior’s rise in the city’s creative milieu, where he befriended Pablo Picasso and Jean Cocteau. After seven years as an art dealer, Dior retrained as a fashion illustrator, eventually landing a job as a fashion designer for Robert Piguet, and in 1941, following a year of military service, he joined the house of Lucien Lelong. Just five years later, with the backing of industrialist Marcel Boussac, the ascendant Dior established his own fashion house, at 30 avenue Montaigne in Paris.
Just two years after the end of World War II, the fashion crowd and the moribund haute couture industry were yearning, comme tout Paris, for security and prosperity, desperate to discard the drab, sexless, utilitarian garb imposed by wartime deprivation. They needed to dream anew.
And Dior delivered: He designed a collection for a bright, optimistic future. “It’s quite a revolution, dear Christian!” exclaimed Carmel Snow, the prescient American editor-in-chief of Harper’s Bazaar, famously proclaiming, “Your dresses have such a new look.” The press ran with the description, christening Dior’s debut Spring/Summer haute couture collection the New Look. “God help those who bought before they saw Dior,” said Snow. “This changes everything.”
Dior’s collection definitively declared that opulence, luxury and femininity were in. His skirts could have 40-meter-circumference hems, and outfits could weigh up to 60 pounds. They were cut and shaped like architecture, on strong foundations that molded women and “freed them from nature,” Dior said. Rather than rationing, his ladies wanted reams of fabric and 19-inch waists enforced by wire corsets, and the fashion world concurred. The debut got a standing ovation.
In the subsequent decade, Paris ruled as the undisputed fashion capital of the world, and Christian Dior reigned as its king. With the luxuriously full skirts of his New Look, suits and his drop-dead gorgeous evening dresses and ball gowns worthy of any princess, Dior gave women the gift of glamour they’d lost in the miserable years of war.
On 1stDibs, find an exquisite range of vintage Christian Dior clothing, jewelry, handbags and other items.
- 1994MaisonMartinMargiela PlungingOpenChestSlinky BlackBiasRuchedHalter SlitDressBy Maison Martin MargielaLocated in Chicago, ILWith the original hand-sewn off-white unbranded rectangular label of Paris-based Maison Martin Margiela, this asymmetrical plunging v-neck black jersey pullover gown was designed in 1994 by Belgium fashion-designer-cum-artist Martin Margiela. In his early deconstruction style, it partly appears to be a ruched halter dress that is positioned on a bias to add curves to shape the waist, while its open overlapping wrap skirt enables ample draping on one side that conceals a high slit from the waist down. Recalling the construction found in two of Martin Margiela's seminal collections--both the upcycled-split 1950s ballgowns of Spring/Summer 1991 and the draped "Stockman" garments of Spring/Summer 1997--this stretch-viscose dress is likewise a bodice with a split skirt, while its 3/4-length sleeves can recall Margiela's famous "shouldered arm bands" if worn with protruding breasts fully exposed. The top has a wide deep gapping chest or back, along with the option to position the looped "halter" cord that hangs from the torso in one of several ways by pulling over the head. For example, if the dress is worn "backwards" with the brand label resting on the upper chest, the cord from the ruching that is positioned in back can be pulled overhead and under the arms, which can secure the front shoulders of the top by pulling the loop overhead again in the other direction to rest on the back of the neck--like the Martin Margiela Spring/Summer 1997 "Stockman evening dress" in the museum collection of TheMet (see our pic of its smaller open-front black halter and half skirt with the neck strap worn this way.) No doubt the buyer will try more creative ways, too! You may be inspired by our other listing for arguably one of Martin Margiela's best Artisanal Line 0 pieces--a couture body harness--that, like his fashion manifesto, enables endless repurposing of button-down tops to create a plunging v-neckline with a distinct rolled collar. The Italian-size 42 dress...Category
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