Dior Before Dior

Christian Dior (1905–57) is recognized as one of those rare designers who changed the course of fashion with a single collection—his first, christened the “New Look” by the fashion press. Dior created a postwar fashion that celebrated abundance, revived French luxury industries and the fortunes of the Parisian haute couture, and ensured that it would reclaim its place at the summit of women’s fashion. Dress historians have lamented that Dior’s career was so brief—twenty-two collections over eleven years, during which his style evolved slowly. The purpose of this article is to show that the Dior style existed long before 1947. By detailed examination of the congruence of certain stylistic elements in the years 1935 through 1946—specific silhouettes, materials, historical allusions, and sources—this article seeks to reconstruct something of the corpus of Dior’s designs while he was an employee at the couture houses of Robert Piguet and Lucien Lelong. By applying a traditional art historical formal analysis, it is possible to expand the number of designs attributed to Dior and arrive at a more complete picture of his career.