Christian Dior, for Holt Renfrew, Circa 1950s, Pink Lace Dress
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Christian Dior, for Holt Renfrew, Circa 1950s, Pink Lace Dress
About the Item
The lace has a beautiful iridescent ribbon overlaid on the entire dress and wrap which makes the ensemble shimmer in the nightlight.
The provenance on this Dior was a prominent Canadian socialite who's husband had been a major woman's wear manufacturer in the 1940s through the 1980s until his passing. Her wardrobe was incredible and this is just one of her beautiful pieces that she had cherished and cared for over the years.
Please note: All of our items listed on 1stdibs are available for private viewing in the couture salon of our Beverly Hills boutique during regular business hours. Please telephone us with any questions, or if you wish to set up a private appointment to view it personally.
Please feel free to contact us anytime should you be looking for a special vintage designer piece ad we will be delighted to review our current inventory for you and should we not have it we will be delighted to place your name on a wish list for the future. Looking forward to serving you soon.
310 385-9036
Elizabeth Mason
- Designer:
- Dimensions:Marked Size: small 4 (US)
- Place of Origin:
- Period:
- Condition:Excellent with a few minor repairs to the interior corset.
- Seller Location:Los Angeles, CA
- Reference Number:1stDibs: U0906254832
Christian Dior
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.
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