The "Bar" Suit
A cream shantung silk jacket with a rounded padded bust, nipped waist, and peplum, paired with a pleated black wool midi skirt — the centerpiece of Dior's first collection, presented in February 1947 on a spring morning in his Avenue Montaigne salon. The jacket required extensive internal boning and padding to achieve its sculptural shape, and the skirt used yards of fabric at a moment when fabric was still rationed in France. The effect was shocking — voluptuous, luxurious, and emphatically feminine.
The "Bar" Suit launched the New Look and restored Paris as the uncontested global capital of fashion after the German Occupation's four-year interruption, reestablishing the authority of haute couture over the American sportswear that had filled the vacuum. It also triggered a fierce political controversy — British and American women denounced it as an attempt to put women back in pre-war subordination, while fashion writers celebrated it as the return of beauty after years of wartime utility.
Dior launched his first collection just twenty-one months after the Liberation of Paris, at a moment of genuine cultural crisis about France's place in the postwar world. The New Look's extravagance was simultaneously an economic stimulus for the French luxury trades devastated by occupation and a cultural statement that France's creative supremacy had survived the war. Carmel Snow of Harper's Bazaar coined the term "New Look" in the salon on the morning of the show.
Fabric shortages and the occupation of Paris created the conditions for American sportswear designers — Claire McCardell, Mainbocher, Norman Norell — to develop a distinctly American approach to fashion independent of Parisian authority. McCardell's Popover dress, designed as washable, affordable, practical clothing for American women doing their own housework, established principles of function and comfort that are now universal.