Word: dior
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...firm, peers into a mirror with the teetering look of calculated indecision, the peculiar mark of a woman buying a dress for herself. Outside, a thousand newspapers and a hundred periodicals were beginning to thunder the word to the limit of the known world. This year the word on Dior is: "The line is free, free as the Paris air ... free from making a choice between wide and narrow . . . free to wear or not to wear a belt...
Looms of Discontent. Dior and his Paris colleagues deal in a perishable commodity-novelty. The result is an obsession with secrecy that makes the trade as security-conscious as a guided-missiles plant, its workings as carefully timed as an amphibious landing. Early last week the dresses ordered by U.S. buyers were actually delivered to them in the U.S., heavily guarded and wrapped against spying. Not until this week will the curtain be lifted to let U.S. women get their first glimpse of the actual dresses, in magazines or newspapers. Working frantically against that deadline, swank stores prepared custom-made...
Bone Is Unattractive. The relationship between Christian Dior and Seventh Avenue is based on mutual need. Ten years ago last month Dior brought out the New Look and Seventh Avenue joyfully discovered that every dress in every closet in the U.S. had been outmoded at one stroke. Every year since then, Seventh Avenue has looked to Dior to do it again. Dior duly assumed the accents proper to a dictator. "The women who are loudest for short skirts will soon be wearing the longest dresses. I know very well the women." He banished knees: "This part is never...
...Seventh Avenue's manufacturers, he was a guiding lamp in an uncertain world; he could tell them not what women had liked (they knew that), but what women would like in the next months, and they could make their plans accordingly. More than any other man, Dior has succeeded in making the Paris couturier, a man dedicated to painstaking and individual design for wealthy and exacting customers, a prime factor in the 20th century era of mass-produced clothes...
Dolls for Britain. Christian Dior is a product of three centuries of elegance that run back to the reign of King Louis XIV. To control the restive feudal nobles he subdued, Louis built the huge palace at Versailles, turned it into a vast gilded cage where the aristocracy, cut off from their lands, were reduced to an idle group waiting on the Sun King. In that sumptuous court, elegance became an obsession, and Louis put the obsession to use. He organized Paris' dressmakers and tailors. Two life-sized dolls, dressed in the latest fashions, were shipped monthly across...