Themes arising from the garment
Post- war affluence and the glamorous housewife – the 1950s and new visions
One of the key themes arising from this garment is the way in which the dress exhibits changing attitudes to femininity. This section addresses this by referencing social, cultural and fashion history and also draws from Feminist discourses.
The post-war period heralded a new dawn in terms of design. Following wartime austerity, design developed with a renewed fervour, challenging shape, style and form by stretching them to their ultimate conclusion, embracing new technologies, fusing creative practices (art, design, craft, popular culture, etc.), and developing new forms of representation in terms of motif and pattern. One might suggest that this excitement emerged as a response to the end of the war, embodying hope for the future.
This collective expression of ‘hope’ was contrasted with a desire to a return to a pre-war era, and as such, can be seen as a utopian revivalist sensibility, in which a nostalgic understanding of peacetime societies of the past could become manifest.
‘This year begins a new era and it follows as the peace of war, that men want women beautiful, romantic…. Birds of paradise instead of hurrying brown hens’. [1]
In relation to fashion the 1950s marks an era dominated by styles and shapes indicative of a return to femininity. The opening quote expresses a media furore intended to instigate a return to peacetime and the maintenance of the status quo, which as this example demonstrates, is a return to patriarchal society and clear gender distinction.
The relationship between floral designs and the creation of femininity has been subject of much feminist discourse within the visual arts [2]. Much of this discourse refers to nineteenth century concepts of the construction of the feminine through biological determinism [3] and binary opposites arising through analyses of gender distinction [4]. With this in mind, it is possible to suggest that floral design exists outside of the remits of Modernist ‘good taste’, is distinctly linked to the ‘frippery’ of women’s taste [5], and therefore defies the avant-garde and in turn, fashion. Yet, at times of social upheaval, specifically times involving gender role confusion, floral design often surfaces as a key motif in women’s-wear as a means of signifying a return to traditional notions of femininity. This was particularly evident in 1950s fashion, its style, promotion, marketing and retail.
The Horrockses dress is indicative of this mood of the times. Indeed, Horockses (est.1946) were pioneers of floral designs in the 1950s and built a reputation built on high quality printed dresses for day and evening wear. The floral banding on the dress was a pattern developed by Alastair Morton of Edinburgh Weavers, which became indicative of Horrockses style[6]
Feminine shapes and frivolous uses of fabric, demonstrating a disregard of wartime restrictions, epitomise the key fashions of the decade. Christian Dior’s ‘Corolle’ line or ‘New Look’ (full skirt, with corseted bodice and padded hips, which used excessive quantities of fabric in its construction and was defined by its concept of exaggeration)[7], first shown in 1947, became a model for style and design throughout the era. The emphasis of the ‘New Look’ on the creation of an exaggerated and curvaceous female form became synonymous with a ‘new’ femininity, which was both traditional and contemporary. Harpers Bazaar stated in 1947 that the skirt of the New Look ‘bursts out into fullness like a flower’[8], further emphasisng the link between floral iconography with femininity.
In relation to fashion, shapes and styles changed, but the significance of a search for the new, a decadence which rejected austerity and a desire to recapture a mood of romance, dominated fashion design for women during the early years of the post-war period. Lesley Jackson describes The significance of the ‘New Look’:
With hindsight it can be seen quite clearly that the New Look brought about a fundamental change in the conception of the female shape that was not just the whim of a season, nor simply a reaction against wartime austerity: it heralded the arrival of a New Look for a new decade. [9]
The Horrocks’s dress is indicative of the ‘New Look’, embracing the stylistic frivolity and glamour associated with the style. It is inherently feminine as although not padded or strictly tailored like the Dior original, the garment is constructed of a fitted bodice which cinches in the waist and a full circle skirt, emphasising movement and a full hip and bust.
Similarly, during this period a desire to search for the new encompassed changing approaches to femininity. This was marked by a distinction surrounding actual and cultural production. This emerged and developed as a condition of mass consumerism in which women’s production moved from the production of goods, to the production of meaning through the consumption of goods[10]. The establishment of women as consumers co-insided with or developed as part of the post-war mass market and mass media in which the promotion of new goods featured heavily, contrasting starkly with the ration reliant Britain of the previous decade[11]. The ‘New Look’ was intended to be seductive, to play on women’s desire for the frivolous, the new and conspicuous display. However, feminist design historians such as Angela Partington have questioned the ways in which women actually consumed these images and ideas, redressing the notion of women as passive consumers[12], as well as accepted attitudes towards the diffusion[13] and dissemination of fashion.
Dior’s ‘New Look’ is seen by fashion historians as embodying a contemporary fashion system, which encourages the dissemination of styles from couture throughout all levels of fashionable clothing consumption, i.e. from ‘high’ to mainstream or high street fashion. The implication of such a connection is that fashion is egalitarian and available to everyone irrespective of budget, geographical location, class and so on. Egalitarianism here is essentially a cultural construct, a media utopia that expressed a new social dawn, which did not mirror the social inequality inherent in British life. A rigid hierarchy dividing classes, regardless of the wartime social cohesion exemplified by ‘the Dunkirk spirit’, had been returned to, and any semblance of equality resided in the media fantasies of access to consumer goods and the lifestyles associated with their acquisition. Nonetheless, there is no doubt that the ‘New Look’ was popular, certainly in terms of its cultural capitol, with the media debating openly the aesthetic, ethics and morality of the style, thus thrusting it into the public domain, encouraging women in their roles as consumers – if not in terms of the garments themselves, in relation to the images and media dialogue[14]. It’s adoption though, as a universal and all-embracing style is a less stable concept and one which highlights other contemporary discourses surrounding fashion such as re-appropriation, and, the construction of a unified model of femininity.
Joanne Hollows acknowledges that post-war fashion cannot be understood in isolation from the emergent consumer culture that came to typify the era. She notes that:
‘By looking in some depth at the fashions of a specific historical period, it is possible to challenge both the idea that mainstream fashion practices are homogeneous and the idea that fashions of a period produce a single, dominant mode of feminine identity’ [15] .
There is evidence to suggest that the ‘New Look’ was disseminated and re-appropriated through consumer choice, wearability, home-dressmaking, and so on. And although it is competent to state that modes of femininity are not homogenous, the reproduction of ‘feminine’ motifs are much less disparate and far more stable. This is particularly evident in the continued popularity of floral patterns and motifs used within clothing for women at times where notions of femininity per se are increasingly fluid. Indeed, floral printed dresses were in abundance in the 1950s, but print styles and forms embraced the zeitgeist embodied in other areas of art and design. New motifs and forms of representation emerged and can be grouped as follows:
a) technology;
b) graphic forms
c) fine art influence
d) changing shapes – elongated forms, exaggerated forms, rounded forms, asymmetric forms;
e) shapes from nature – flora and fauna (tulip/butterfly)
f) romance – the predominance of roses (particularly red roses)
Floral prints were not only indicative of femininity and embracing the zeitgeist for exaggeration, but also were linked to a new mood of hope and faith in the future. To refer to nature in motif construction, can be seen as part of a desire for renewal, of letting things run their course, of putting faith in a higher power, and sowing seeds for the future. Floral motifs and patterns here express re-birth, starting afresh, but returning to something beyond man’s ultimate control.
[1] Harpers Bazaar, October, 1945, quoted in Valerie Steele, Fifty Years of Fashion: New Look to Now, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2000, p.1
[2] Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock, ‘Crafty Women and the Hierarchy of the Arts’, Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology, Pandora, 1981; P Sparke, As Long as it’s Pink: The Sexual Politics of Taste, Pandora, 1995.
[3] Penelope Brown and Ludmilla Jordanova, ‘Oppressive Dichotomies: Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture?’, in Jessica Munns and Gita Rajan, A Cultural Studies Reader, Longman, 1995, pp.485-490. Also Lynda Nead, Myths of Sexuality, Blackwell, 1988.
[4] Pat Kirkham (ed) The Gendered Object, Manchester University Press, 1996
[5] Penny Sparke, As Long as it’s Pink: the sexual politics of taste, Pandora, 1995
[6] Lesley Jackson, 20th Century Pattern Design, London:Mitchell Bealey, 2002, pp. 97-98
[7] Valerie Steele, Fifty Years of Fashion, pp.1-4.
[8] Harpers Bazaar, April 1947, p.29, quoted in Lesley Jackson, The New Look: Design in the Fifties, Thames and Hudson, London, 1991 & 1998, p.120.
[9] Lesley Jackson, The New Look: Design in the Fifties, Thames and Hudson, London, 1991 & 1998, p.8.
[10] Angela Partington, ‘The Designer Housewife in the 1950s’, in Judy Attfield and Pat Kirkham (eds), A View from the Interior: Women and Design, The Women’s Press, London, 1989, p.206.
[11] Roy & Gwen Shaw, ‘The Cultural and Social Setting’ in Boris Ford (ed), Modern Britain, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1988 & 1992, p. 17.
[12] Ibid, pp. 208-211; Angela Partington, ‘Popular Fashion and Working Class Affluence’, in Juliet Ash & Elizabeth Wilson (ed.s), Chic Thrills: A Fashion Reader, Pandora, London, 1992, pp.145-161.
[13] Yuniya Kawamura, Fashion-ology: An Introduction to Fashion Studies, Berg, Oxford, 2005, pp. 73-88.
[14] Lesley Jackson, The New Look: Design in the Fifties, Thames and Hudson, London, 1991 & 1998, p.8.
[15] Joanne Hollows, Feminism, Femininity and Popular Culture, Manchester University Press, 2000, p.148
