From war to Dior

The lingerie of the day is worth a whole story in itself. When I arrive at Lotherton Hall, near Leeds, for a preview of a major exhibition celebrating Fifties fashion, Natalie Raw, curator of costume and textiles, is preparing for display some beautiful but rather elaborate undergarments – the very foundations of the new shapes. “The Fifties was very much about enhancing feminine attributes, so your bust is quite important, and then the cinched-in waist,” she says.

“In the ’40s and wartime, when women started to go out to work and do a lot more because the men were off at war, they threw off a lot of the structured undergarments to give more movement. The Fifties come in and they go back to wearing structured garments to give you that cinched-in waist look. It’s almost as if they have lost some of that freedom gained during the http://www.pickedlooks.com/evening-dresses-c_13/.”

Maybe not so good then, for women, as the domestic goddess became the ultimate ideal. Natalie says: “There’s this idea that they have got to be the perfect housewife and glamorous and very feminine, and it’s going against everything they had achieved during the war.”

And yet, and yet… the pure glamour of the 1950s cannot be denied, and it’s not hard to understand why so many women embraced it after years of austerity, when fabric of any kind was in short supply, let alone taffeta and silk. No wonder they lit up at the sight of a voluminous, dazzling Dior New Look gown.

From couture to home-made, the extraordinary fashions of the Fifties will come to life for the Age of Glamour exhibition at Lotherton Hall, an Edwardian country house and estate which was once home to the Gascoigne family but now houses Leeds Museums and Galleries’ collection of fashion and textiles. “We’re showing the high-end couture and how it filters down to the High Street,” Natalie says, and points to a pink evening dress, an early ready-to-wear creation by Jacques Heim, bought at Harrods to wear to a ball at Blenheim Palace. “Jacques Heim has his Paris couture house, but in the Fifties he, along with other people like Christian Dior, are recognising the rise of the ready-to-wear industry. Before the Fifties, it was seen as shoddy and cheap, but now they are starting to go out and buy it.”

As well as Lotherton’s own archive offerings, there are gowns on loan from the V&A, including a red Ecarlate cocktail dress from Dior’s La Ligne Y collection of 1955, a 1951 ballgown by Cristobal Balenciaga, plus pieces from Norman Hartnell and luxurious ready-to-wear dresses from British designer labels Frank Usher, Susan Small and Horrockses.

Natalie says: “There were quite strict rules. For evening dress, you wore a long dress, and then for early evening dos, you wore your cocktail dress, which can be a bit shorter.”

This was a fascinating period for fashion, a style revolution led by the French couturiers, but also the dawn of High Street fashion as we know it today, with the start of mass production as department stores, including, in Leeds alone, Marks & Spencer, Marshall & Snelgrove, Schofields and Lewis’s, realised that designer looks could be copied and reproduced off-the-peg to cater for women who longed to inject glamour into their lives. This Parisian style was also captured and reproduced by clever at-home dressmakers, whose work can also be seen, and there are wonderful insights into the shopping and leisure habits of the period.