designer’s anti-Semitic episode to occur. The future of Dior’s leadership is still undecided, but it seems impossible that a nauseating bout of drunken ranting will be able to tarnish the heritage of the Christian Dior brand for long. In 1947 Christian Dior launched his fashion house with the Corolle line, renamed by an American journalist as the ‘New Look’, not necessarily as an entirely new aesthetic in the history of fashion, but a fresh star t after the utility wear that had dominated out of necessity during World War II. The Corolle line featured a mix of the traditional and the modern, borrowing something of a Victorian inf luence in its nipped-in V shape, yet playing to an aspirational modern look, very much geared to dressing for an occasion. The emphasis was f irmly on luxury, with a structured silhouette and a high-quality f inish, resulting in designs that were utterly elegant, if not wholly practical for the average woman going about her daily business. The ultra- feminine contours of the Corolle line required a return to corsetry – a far cry from the uncorseted minimalism previously touted by Chanel, who, amongst others, was contemptuous of a return to the restricted female body. Unsurprisingly, there was some feminist resistance to the New Look; the Little Below the Knee Club gave a voice to a large body of American women furious at Dior’s proposed lowered skir t lengths, after the freedom (both symbolic and in terms of movement) of a hemline that stopped just


Image courtesy of Musée Christian Dior


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