Dior 1950s Dress

Shopping for vintage Christian Dior dresses of the 1950s? 

Before his unexpected death in 1957, Christian Dior created dramatic evening dresses and gowns that celebrated luxury and femininity — and gave to women the gift of glamour they’d lost in the miserable years of the war. 

The visionary French couturier introduced lavish hourglass ball gowns and luxuriously full skirts, while his silk floral print cocktail dresses of the 1950s remain light and versatile today. Two decades before he debuted his celebrated New Look, however, Dior was an art dealer.

Initially interested in art and architecture, Dior opened an art gallery in 1928 in Paris with a friend. This was the start of his rise in the city’s creative milieu, where he befriended Pablo Picasso and Jean Cocteau. Later, Dior retrained as a fashion illustrator, eventually working as a fashion designer for Robert Piguet, and went on to join the house of Lucien Lelong in 1941. With the backing of industrialist Marcel Boussac, the ascendant Dior established his own fashion house, at 30 Avenue Montaigne in Paris in 1946. 

The label’s founder signed his first licensing contract, for stockings, in 1949; by 1957 the company had licenses in 87 countries.

Just after World War II, the fashion crowd and the moribund haute couture industry — desperate to discard the drab, sexless, utilitarian garb imposed by wartime deprivation — needed to dream anew. Dior delivered: He designed a collection for a bright, optimistic future. 

“Your dresses have such a new look," exclaimed Carmel Snow, the prescient American editor-in-chief of Harper’s Bazaar. The press ran with the description, christening Dior’s debut Spring/Summer haute couture collection the New Look. 

In the 1950s, Paris ruled as the undisputed fashion capital of the world, and Christian Dior reigned as its king. There were strapless, expertly draped gowns in brilliant red or sweet, tulle-skirted dresses in delicate ballerina pink. 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.

Find vintage Christian Dior 1950s dresses on 1stDibs.