Christian Dior Evening Dresses and Gowns

Christian Dior's dramatic evening dresses and gowns celebrated luxury and femininity in the late 1940s — and gave to women the gift of glamour they’d lost in the miserable years of the war. The visionary French couturier introduced lavish hourglass ball gowns and luxuriously full skirts, while his vintage silk floral print cocktail dresses remain light and versatile today. Two decades before he debuted his celebrated New Look, however, Dior was an art dealer.

Initially interested in art and architecture, Dior (1905–57) opened an art gallery in 1928 in Paris with a friend. This was the start of his rise in the city’s creative milieu, where he befriended Pablo Picasso and Jean Cocteau. Later, Dior retrained as a fashion illustrator, eventually working as a fashion designer for Robert Piguet, and went on to join the house of Lucien Lelong in 1941. With the backing of industrialist Marcel Boussac, the ascendant Dior established his own fashion house at 30 Avenue Montaigne in Paris in 1946.

Just after World War II, the fashion crowd and the moribund haute couture industry — desperate to discard the drab, sexless, utilitarian garb imposed by wartime deprivation — needed to dream anew. Dior delivered: He designed a collection for a bright, optimistic future. 

“Your dresses have such a new look," exclaimed Carmel Snow, the prescient American editor-in-chief of Harper’s Bazaar. The press ran with the description, christening Dior’s debut Spring/Summer haute couture collection the New Look. 

The New Look — the silhouette introduced by the couturier with his first namesake collection in 1947 — was characterized by soft, rounded shoulders; a prominent bust; waspish waistlines; and long, voluminous skirts. Dior’s work definitively declared that opulence was in, and his return to a “pretty,” highly feminized style was a direct reaction to years of wartime austerity. 

Dior’s 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.

On 1stDibs, find vintage Dior dresses and gowns, including day dresses, cocktail dresses and silk formal gowns designed by John Galliano.