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Not since Irene Castle bobbed her hair in 1914 had there been such turmoil, twittering and posturing among American women. What was going on? The search for the "New Look." What was the New Look? No one knew precisely.
Some fashion designers proposed hobble skirts, hoop skirts and skirts that flapped about the ankles. Some went in for unpadded shoulders; others padded hips. Some placed their trust in the back bustle, side bustle and the wasp-waist corset, whose constrictions in the last century had been a mainstay of jokesmiths and had made its wearers subject to fainting fits and worse.
In short, fashion was up to its old tricks—peddling, as Oscar Wilde observed, "that by which the fantastic becomes for a moment universal."
All this dithering convinced many a woman that the New Look was merely cockeyed. In Georgia, a group of outraged men formed the League of Broke Husbands, hoped to get "30,000 American husbands to hold that hemline." In Louisville, 1,265 Little Below the Knee Club members signed a manifesto against any change in the old knee-high style. And in Oildale, Calif., Mrs. Louise Horn gave a timely demonstration of the dangers lurking in the New Look. As she alighted from a bus, her new long, full skirt caught in the door. The bus started up and she had to run a block before the bus stopped and she was freed.
Revolution. Despite such minor setbacks, the style revolution rolled on. It had been too carefully planned to be stopped by such molehills as unorganized scoffers or individual critics. When wartime clothing restrictions were abandoned a year ago, designers had cautiously lowered hems a bit. This excited so little interest that the $4 billion women's clothing industry, one of the biggest in the U.S., fell into a frightening slump this spring. Orders in many lines fell off as much as 60% (some of this was due to manufacturers' waiting for fabric price cuts that never came). Obviously, what was needed was a sweeping change—a revolution in style that would make all the present styles unwearable.
As U.S. designers fell to this job with a will, they were ably abetted by Paris. There the brasshats of fashion, indifferent as always to the wishes or even the shapes of their subjects, panted to regain the attention, if not the prestige, which they had lost during the war. Almost before anyone could say haute couture, such Parisian newcomers as Christian Dior were making a great to-do about squeezing waists into wasp lines and padding out hips—and the revolution was on.
Counter-Revolution. As with most revolutions, this one bred its own counterrevolution. Last week, in the perfumed air of a pale blue room on the third floor of Manhattan's Saks Fifth Avenue, one act of that counterrevolution was being staged. There Designer Sophie Gimbel was displaying her fall collection of 125 models. In the world of high fashion, it was a notable event.