Dior New Look

This is new territory for me. I've been watching Project Runway for the last few seasons, and really enjoying it. I know, really, nothing about fashion. I'm currently reading two books -- Fashion for Dummies by Jill Martin, which is, from my naive but not insensible point of view, good basic advice on how to dress, and The Thoughtful Dresser by Linda Grant, which is reflections on the meaning of clothes and fashion, and which I am finding really insightful (to be fair, most writing on fashion is going to seem insightful to me). Linda Grant is a British novelist a few years older than me, but close enough in age that I can catch a lot of her cultural references and know exactly what she's talking about. I'm just starting the second chapter, and having read a reference to Dior's 1947 "New Look", I went to see what was available at youtube that might show me some of the couture that revolutionized fashion in the postwar era.

One of the things that is really striking to me is the seemingly impossible waists -- some of those models must be corseted to within and inch of their lives! But they are beautiful dresses, I love the third one, the white(?), textured, sparkly fabric, the wide flowing skirt. It seems like such a happy garment, meant for celebration. I also like the dramatic suit you see fifth. and, actually, pretty much all of what this vid shows. These designs were shown first when my mother was, by my estimation, a freshman in High School, and I know that she loved these sorts of looks.

I can't discuss them intelligently, sorry, but I do find them to be beautiful.

CONTINUED: A couple of things should be mentioned: First, I miscounted the garments in the video, and I find, especially considering what I'm also going to add here, that this makes things confusing. The second look that I really wanted to mention because I thought it was beautiful and dramatic was the sixth one, not the fifth. The fifth look (the checked suit) was the outfit I saw that most looked to me like it made use of a rather severe corset. My girlfriend tells me that there were no corsets used in the New Look, so I'm not sure how they achieved that very restricted wasp waist.