Christian Dior Pumps

Elevate your style with a pair of Christian Dior pumps, the ultimate luxurious footwear for any ensemble. 

With everything from desirable evening dresses to chic Dior slingback heels, the visionary designer altered the landscape of 20th-century fashion when he established his celebrated couture house in the postwar years.

The ’60s saw a fashion revolution like none other. From the prim styles of the 1950s to the rebellion of the late-’60s hippies, the changes were more than just trends — they represented an upheaval of social mores. At the time, revered French shoemaker Roger Vivier was creating footwear for Dior, experimenting with toe shapes and forms and introducing decorative flourishes to his works. 

Vivier, whose clients would come to include Queen Elizabeth II and The Beatles, was a bold innovator who adorned his shoe designs with exotic leathers, bronze beads and pearls. 

As the mods were expressing their countercultural ways through rebellious dress during the 1960s, their new silhouettes and expressions infiltrated the collections of Paris’s most elite designers (see, it always trickles up from the street). A refined expression of the era’s popular pilgrim pump, for example, merged the androgyny of the mods with the previous decade’s feminine sophistication. 

Red satin pumps were guaranteed show-stoppers under Parisian streetlights, while velvet pumps reflected the youthquake’s influence — velvet, which began its 1960s resurgence in bohemian apparel, became elevated to ladylike elegance.

Find vintage Christian Dior pumps, black heels and other covetable Dior footwear on 1stDibs.

When Christian Dior launched his couture house, in 1946, he wanted nothing less than to make “an elegant woman more beautiful and a beautiful woman more elegant.” He succeeded, and in doing so the visionary designer altered the landscape of 20th century fashion. Vintage Dior bags, shoes, evening dresses, shirts and other garments and accessories are known today for their feminine and sophisticated sensibility.

Dior was born in Granville, on the Normandy coast, in 1905. His prosperous haute bourgeois parents wanted him to become a diplomat despite his interest in art and architecture. However, they agreed to bankroll an art gallery, which Dior opened in 1928 in Paris with a friend.

This was the start of Dior’s rise in the city’s creative milieu, where he befriended Pablo Picasso and Jean Cocteau. After seven years as an art dealer, Dior retrained as a fashion illustrator, eventually landing a job as a fashion designer for Robert Piguet, and in 1941, following a year of military service, he joined the house of Lucien Lelong. Just five years later, with the backing of industrialist Marcel Boussac, the ascendant Dior established his own fashion house, at 30 avenue Montaigne in Paris.

Just two years after the end of World War II, the fashion crowd and the moribund haute couture industry were yearning, comme tout Paris, for security and prosperity, desperate to discard the drab, sexless, utilitarian garb imposed by wartime deprivation. They needed to dream anew.

And Dior delivered: He designed a collection for a bright, optimistic future. “It’s quite a revolution, dear Christian!” exclaimed Carmel Snow, the prescient American editor-in-chief of Harper’s Bazaar, famously proclaiming, “Your dresses have such a new look.” The press ran with the description, christening Dior’s debut Spring/Summer haute couture collection the New Look. “God help those who bought before they saw Dior,” said Snow. “This changes everything.”

Dior’s collection definitively declared that opulence, luxury and femininity were in. His skirts could have 40-meter-circumference hems, and outfits could weigh up to 60 pounds. They were cut and shaped like architecture, on strong foundations that molded women and “freed them from nature,” Dior said. Rather than rationing, his ladies wanted reams of fabric and 19-inch waists enforced by wire corsets, and the fashion world concurred. The debut got a standing ovation.

In the subsequent decade, Paris ruled as the undisputed fashion capital of the world, and Christian Dior reigned as its king. With the luxuriously full skirts of his New Look, suits and his drop-dead gorgeous couture dresses and ball gowns worthy of any princess, Dior gave women the gift of glamour they’d lost in the miserable years of war.

On 1stDibs, find an exquisite range of vintage Christian Dior clothing, jewelry, handbags and other items.