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Crazy About 50’s Fashion

skirt2It was a wonderful time to be young—and crazy about fashion. It was 1956, and I was seventeen. Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield and Rita Hayworth were regulars on the cover of popular magazines. Audrey Hepburn was larger than life in the movies. They were beautiful, slim and famous.  I did everything I could to emulate them.  The fact that I lived in a tiny backwoods village in Canada did nothing to deter me.  Television had not yet arrived in our community, and radio was oblivious to fashion.  But my sisters and I had magazines, newspapers and catalogues at our disposal. Life, Time, Redbook and Eaton’s catalogue were the mainstay of our influences, and they fed our blossoming tastes in clothing, and gave us a springboard to the fashion world.

Although movies reflecting
current fashion rarely came to our small town, printed media was replete with images from Broadway and the movies. Popular magazines dripped with pictures of the glamorous movie stars of the day—Grace Kelly, Marilyn Munroe, Ava Gardner and Ingrid Bergman.  Broadway offered up its leading female stars to the exposure of print— Julie Andrews, and Shirley Jones.

photo skirt1By the end of my seventeenth year, I was independent and moved to Edmonton to work in the Hudson’s Bay Department store. My modest salary barely covered my living expenses, but I prowled the clothing racks every noon hour and eventually built up a wardrobe of skirts, blouses and dresses that ensured I would have a new change for every day of the week.  These are the styles that showed up in my closet:

  • sack dress (blouson or tunic, which became the chemise)
  • see-through nylon lace blouse
  • pencil skirt
  • peplin suit jacket
  • cowl-necked jacket
  • fitted sheath (an early version)
  • circle skirt (a one-time purchase)

Christian Dior was at the height of his powers in the mid-1950s. He extended his “New Look”, the silhouette, well into that decade. The silhouette was characterised by a small, nipped-in waist and full skirt falling below mid-calf length. It emphasised the bust and hips, producing an hourglass shape. This look became very popular, and Dior gained a number of prominent high-profile clients from Hollywood, the United States and the European aristocracy as a result.

The stores were full of  dresses with nipped-in waists and full skirts that fell below the calf, but I was too short for these fashions, and after a few tries stopped buying them.

What I didn’t know, and wouldn’t know until I developed an awareness of designers many years later, was the origin and the power of these underlying influences. Designer exposure took time, and “new looks” sometimes took several seasons to find their way to the clothing racks of Canadian stores. In 1955, for instance, Cristobal Balenciaga designed the tunic dress, which later developed into the chemise dress of 1957, or, as was commonly known, the “sack” dress.  And eventually, in 1959, his work culminated in the Europe line, which featured high-waisted dresses and coats.

I remember the chemise dress vividly and owned two of them, one in a fine dark blue print, and another in a pumpkin shade.  It took a few more years more to bring the empire waist to my attention, but once I discovered the style, I realized how flattering it was for my small frame. It was a very soft, romantic look, and I loved it!

Gradually I developed an awareness of designers, and came to know which influence would look best on me. Later, when I bought some Vogue patterns and learned to sew, I discovered the magic of Christian Dior, Coco Chanel and Oleg Cassini.  My wardrobe expanded with an array of colours and fabrics, all shaped into figure flattering structured dresses and suits, at the cost of a few dollars compared to what it had cost the fashion mavens of Paris!

As the decade wore on, however, I was to learn something more about the fashions I was so attracted to. I was eighteen by the time the year ended—I was heading into womanhood. I could wear the styles with confidence, even though it was correct at the time to wear a scandalously figure-controlling  undergarment (the panty-girdle), which restricted the natural curves of the body.  Much later, it would become apparent to the women of our day that there was something ominous about these trends we followed—and the physical and emotional price we were paying for them.  Much more about this in future blog posts.

Readers, please note that I have been as accurate as memory allows in my recollection of the events and clothing I write about. My purpose in writing about this topic is to explore vintage fashion in the context of my own life in the hopes of a more universal understanding. Posts of this nature will be filed in a category devoted to this look at fashion and its controlling influence in the lives of European and North American women. Look for future articles in my “Fashions of the 50s” category.

 

http://www.thepeoplehistory.com/1956fashions.html   (two pictures above)

2 thoughts on “Crazy About 50’s Fashion”

  1. Still the Lucky Few

    I loved this era in fashion, although the culture around it was restrictive and possibly harmful. The perfect body in the perfect girdle! I know today’s fashions are based mostly on revealing as much of the human body as possible, but they do allow a person to move! But I agree, the 50s fashions were classic, and can be worn, with some modifications, even today.

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