Christian Dior's 10-Year Sprint: The New Look, Licensing and Saint Laurent

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Christian Dior ran his own fashion house for only about a decade. In 1946 textile magnate Marcel Boussac, whose vertically integrated business ran from sheep to weaving mills, asked Dior to revive the fading Philippe et Gaston label. Dior refused and demanded a new house under his own name, winning legal leadership of the firm, a non-controlling stake, a generous salary and one-third of pre-tax profits. The house opened in late 1946 at 30 Avenue Montaigne in Paris with 80 employees. On February 12, 1947, Dior showed 90 looks with nipped waists, soft shoulders and skirts below the calf, including the Bar suit built in an atelier headed by a young Pierre Cardin, and the press called it the New Look.

The volume of fabric, sometimes 20 yards per dress, drew backlash: a League of Broke Husbands claimed 30,000 members, feminist critics called the corseted shapes regressive, and Coco Chanel criticized them. By 1949 Dior accounted for 75 percent of Paris fashion exports and 5 percent of France's export revenue. He launched Miss Dior perfume, named for his sister Catherine, opened a New York ready-to-wear store in 1948, and in 1950 he and general manager Jacques Rouët launched licensing for ties, hosiery, gloves and handbags, which the French couture chamber denounced. Dior appeared on the cover of Time in March 1957 and died of a third heart attack in Italy that October at 52. Yves Saint Laurent, his 21-year-old assistant, took over and debuted in 1958.

• Dior's 1947 debut was shown in the house's own salons on six mannequins.
• Cloth rationing was still legally enforced in some markets when the New Look appeared.
• The house announced 100,000 garments sold at its 10th anniversary in 1957.
• Management considered shutting the house after Dior's death because licensees and exports depended on him.
• Later designers included Marc Bohan, Gianfranco Ferré, John Galliano, Raf Simons and Maria Grazia Chiuri.