Christian Dior and Germany, 1947 to 1957

Abstract

Christian Dior pulled off a coup that would revolutionise the international fashion scene when he showed his first collection on 12 February 1947. Thus was the 'New Look' born, which made his Paris fashion house world-famous overnight. Today Dior's early collections symbolise the rebirth of Paris haute couture after 1945. Within only a few years Christian Dior rose to rule over a flourishing luxury empire and was celebrated throughout the world as the monarch of fashion until his sudden death in October 1957. His twenty-two haute couture collections - including the celebrated A and H as well as Tulip lines - comprising some three thousand models, represent a design legacy that, more than any other, wrote 20th-century fashion history. This superlative publication marks two anniversaries: it is published sixty years after the first Christian Dior collection was launched and fifty years after his untimely death. For the first time the links between Christian Dior and Germany in the founder years of Maison Dior (1947-1957) are focused on. Twenty original, for the most part unpublished Dior models from German museums are shown, including the fabulous Marlene Dietrich Collection in Berlin. The twenty-four Dior fashion jewellery sets made in Pforzheim presented here are astonishingly fine and richly diverse. This sumptuously illustrated book contains an extensive annotated catalogue as well as essays by five distinguished fashion and jewellery specialists, on the fashion jewellery made under a licensing agreement in Germany for Dior, the early Dior fashion shows in Germany, Christian Dior's sole post-war visit to Germany as well as the reception of Dior fashions as echoed in German-language journals and magazines of that time.

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