Transcript
KHOLE YOHANNAN:
The power of the image was out there. People knew and it was seductive.
MALE:
Here's to the ladies, the fair and the weak. But who dares call them weak? Our modern girls play as hard and with much vitality and stamina as any man.
KHOLE YOHANNAN:
By the late 1930s with the outbreak of World War II and there you see a breakdown in the fashion chain. American fashion really comes on to the map with the shut down the French couture. Casual wear was popular here so a new type of model, the all-American scrubbed clean beauties, long haired, healthy, athletic, that comes in the vogue.
MALE:
Already a few teenage models rank as full pledge cover girls. Their faces familiar from coast to coast in advertisements and on magazine covers.
KHOLE YOHANNAN:
Paralleling that, Dior unleashes the new look on the world and in comes hyper stylized fashion.
If you look at the gestures that woman have, this is almost contortionist and yet there's an imperious haughtiness in her face which shows no effort at all. It's very important, you were bullet proof.
MALE:
Then along came a Frenchman and down came the hemlines. The new look was here STARTED up by a new comer on the fashion scene named Christian Dior. Small thanks he got from the boys.
KHOLE YOHANNAN:
In 1949, Dorian Leigh modeled this beautiful Robert Piguet dress and you can see that her body has taken on that very refined elegant sense of feminine extremity. Women's very physicality was transformed by Christian Dior's vision.
MALE:
A great new allied industry has grown up in the U.S. over the past 25 years, the model business.
JOHN CASABLANCAS:
Around the '50s I think is when the efforts of people like Eileen Ford began really structuring modeling as an industry. It's really at that time when the first generation of true agents happened.
MALE:
Patty felt that her best bet was the Conover agency which specializes in wholesome, unsophisticated types. But she could never hope to scale the professional heights attained by fame fashion model Lisa Fonssagrives who’s hourly rate is often as high as $40.
KHOLE YOHANNAN:
In 1955, Richard Avedon shot Dovima, one of the greatest most sophisticated models of the 1950s with the elephants. What's extraordinary about this is that this is the Yves Saint Laurent's first collection for Christian Dior. So it's really an iconic fashion history.
ANAMARIA WILSON:
We still look at those photos and they're so gorgeous and they're so aspirational. And you still want to wear those clothes. It's very glamorous but it's very studied. You know, it's the big hat, it’s the gloves, it's the waist, it's the razor cut. It's Dior's new look. It’s a very particular kind of fashion.
MALE:
What the nation's press on the mass circulation magazines report on the season's fashion, whether from Hollywood or New York, soon becomes gospels. Women in every whistle stop or a midland suburb are as up-to-date on American style as most of their urban sisters.
DAYLE HADDON:
I remember that. You had those little hats with the half veils. You know, it set it on like a hair band with some little flowers. The hair is really set and small and have button earrings. Everything was like buttoned up. So as a girl, from my mother, I saw that. There was no room for individuality. If you didn't conform, you are ostracized.
MALE:
Though a Paris label still carry great prestige, big names in the world of fashion have emerged across the Atlantic.
KHOLE YOHANNAN:
You had American models going over and lighting up the French couture. It’s a really exciting dynamic. Suzy, Jean Patchett, Dorian, all of them went right over.
MALE:
Intensely overcrowded and over publicized, modeling is a hazardous field in which new faces constantly replace old.
KHOLE YOHANNAN:
Boundaries began to be broken all over the place but not only in fashion.
