Paris after the Liberation 1944-1949

dissolved into mascara-blackened tears and was incapable of making another entry. But as each new dress appeared it was greeted with gasps of admiration and applause. Members of Dior’s staff kept bursting into his office to report each new success; but he could not quite believe what had happened until he emerged, to be given athunderous standing ovation. Among the most enthusiastic was Carmel Snow of
Harper’s Bazaar
. ‘Your dresses have such a
new look
!’ she exclaimed – and so the name was born.
    The clothes looked simple, but they were extremely complex in construction. The most famous dress of his first collection was ‘
Bar
’: a white shantung jacket, nipped in at the waist and exaggerating the curve of the hips, above a wide black pleated skirt. Dior’s favourite dress in the collection, however, was called ‘
Chérie
’: beneath a tight bodice and tiny waist, the skirt consisted of yard after yard of white faille. A rumour went round that Dior’s backer, Marcel Boussac, actively encouraged Dior’s extravagant use of cloth to boost his textile sales. Dior always hotly denied it, and pointed out that Boussac dealt mainly in cotton – a material for which he had very little use.
    The impact of the show was astonishing, and reached far beyond the world of fashion. One old regular of the Jockey Club, M. de Lasteyrie, remarked that he had never heard a couturier’s name mentioned on the premises in the forty years he had been a member, but now ‘
on ne parle que de Dior
’.
    Balmain, like Dior, had spent the early part of the war in the unoccupied zone, in his native Aix-les-Bains, where he had met Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. After they had returned to Paris, Balmain and Dior worked side by side, designing all the clothes that the house of Lucien Lelong produced, for Lelong himself never pretended to be a designer. Dior wrote: ‘Neither Balmain nor I will ever forget that Lelong taught us our profession, in spite of all the restrictions of wartime and the constant fear of sudden closure.’
    In 1945, Pierre Balmain left Lelong to found his own
maison de couture
. His first collection was pronounced fresh and imaginative. Although not particularly avant-garde, the opening show was graced by the presence of his friends from Aix: ‘Gertrude Stein with her familiar cropped head, and Alice B. Toklas with her dark moustache, sitting in the seats of honour watching the pretty striped numbers go by, noting them meticulously on their cards with the same intensity of interest as they had noted the Matisses or Picassos that had passed through their lives’.
    Susan Mary Patten went to Dior’s first collection, and, as one of the
vendeuses
had become a friend of hers, ‘I was allowed into the fitting-rooms afterwards to try on some models. This was more dangerous than entering a den of female lions before feeding time, as the richest ladies in Europe were screaming for the models, shrill cries of “WHERE is ‘Miss New York’? I had it and someone has stolen it right from under my eyes!”’
    Daisy Fellowes, on the other hand, did not have to fight with the crowd in the Avenue Montaigne – the clothes which everyone desired so desperately came to her at the Ritz. ‘She is living in the most magnificent apartment on the first floor,’ wrote Duff Cooper, ‘and there
vendeuses
from Dior were showing her dresses and drinking her champagne. It was an exhibition of great wealth.’
    The conspicuous extravagance of Dior’s clothes was offensive to those for whom the war had meant five years of misery. ‘People shout
ordures
at you from vans,’ wrote Nancy Mitford to Eddy Sackville-West, ‘because for some reason it creates class feeling in a way no sables could.’ Just how offensive was proved by a photographic session organized in March 1947, which was designed to display Dior’s clothes in typically Parisian surroundings. Among the obvious settings such as the Eiffel Tower and the Champs-Élysées someone thought of a street market in Montmartre.
    The clothes were dispatched to Montmartre in great wooden packing cases on board a
camionette
. The models changed into them in the back room of a bar. But when, proud and graceful, the first one walked out into the rue Lepic market, the effect was electric. The street sank into an uneasy silence; and then, with a shriek of outrage, a woman stallholder hurled herself on the nearest model, shouting insults. Another woman joined her and together