from John Kobal, Movie Star Portraits of the Forties, p.53.
The Second World War, which lasted from 1939 to 1945, brought fashion to somewhat of a standstill. Poverty, the rationing of fabric, and the growth of women in the workforce, all contributed to the need for a more utilitarian than glamorous look. Garments became less frivolous, and to conserve fabric, skirts shortened to knee level.
By 1945, however, in direct reaction to the shortages and restrictions of the war, people wanted to return to the luxuries of the Edwardian period, where fashion was formal, elegant, and feminine. A pioneer of this more feminine post-war fashion was Christian Dior, the credited founder of the 'New Look.' The New Look emphasized the hourglass form of the female by focusing on a pronounced bust, a cinched waist, and curvaceous hips.
For evening gowns, the New Look meant form-fitting bodices which were held up primarily by dainty shoulder straps, or no straps at all. This culminated in an increased popularity of strapless dresses later in the 1950s. Another feature was the use of tulle and netting to give skirts a bouffant look which contrasted with, and therefore accentuated, the small waist of the hour-glass shape. The most important characteristics of post-war eveningwear fashion, however, were the re-appearance of extravagances that had been denied during the war years, such as evening wraps, decoration, and the utilization of large amounts of fabric.
These features are particularly apparent in the museum dress featured here. For example, the dress comes with a matching scarf, both of which are painstakingly covered with gold silk cording. The cording fans out from the waist to the hem of the skirt and, in so doing, emphasizes the large amount of fabric used for the skirt. The bodice is form-fitting, and the placement of the gold cording here draws attention to the bust. The bodice is also held up by two spaghetti straps. All of these features suggest this dress is of the post-war era.
But it is hard to determine exactly when this dress was produced, when confronted with visual evidence such as the two images presented here. In the first photograph, Joan Crawford wears a skirt very similar to that of the museum dress. Not only is the skirt a complete circle, but it's design is created to emphasize that fullness, in that the contrasting colored sections of the skirt focus attention on that aspect. However, this Hollywood image dates to the early 1940s.
The second image, with its two examples of New Look fashion, shares some of the spirit of the museum dress, in that all three bodices are fitted, shoulders are bare, and skirts are full. But here the skirts differ in that the images are extremely bouffant, quite artificially so with the aid of extra petticoats, whereas the museum dress is not. Thus, the speculation is that the dress perhaps falls in between the two periods, the early 40s wartime and the late 40s New Look, and serves as a transitional style from one to the other.
Chelsea Erlenborn,
Spring, 1998