1950s Fashion

The antidote to the austere fashion deprivations of the 1930s and the wartime fabric restrictions that characterized the Forties arrived in the immediate post-war period when designers were at last permitted to make manifest their restrained cleverness and create an aesthetic style in a mode that was overindulgent in its use of fabric. This fashion revolt commenced in Paris, when Christian Dior showed his first collection in 1947 – couturiers in every style capitol in the West willingly kowtowed and a new era in fashion was born.

Looking back, the fashion silhouette of the 1950s is remembered as having a very narrow waistline, but in the early days of the decade, as this 1951 fashion review indicates, the feminine waist was a highly contested battle ground:

Where’s the waist? Paris popped the question, but has yet to give the answer. On the one hand, many leading designers showed a tendency to raise the waistline. But they were challenged by a strong minority that seemed determined to drop it [pictures of both high and low are provided herein]…Apparently, Paris has decreed it the year of the wandering waist. Where it will stop may well be up to American women.

If you’d like to read about the feminine silhouette of the early Forties, click here.

Here are a few short paragraphs accompanied by nine images concerning what the college girls of the early Fifties were wearing:

A girl can still get into college with a sweater and skirt, but for full credit she needs quantities of gadgets. For campus, girls stick to classic Brooks Brothers sweaters, pleated skirts, blue jeans – but go wild on accessories and underwear novelties…

The journalist then went to some effort listing many of the fashionable essentials: stamp bracelets, rhinestone handcuff bracelets, silk pleated turtleneck sweaters and harness-neck bib fronts – all to die for.