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February marked the start of the spring collections. It was always an exciting time, and the shows at the different maisons de couture were announced in the press in far larger letters than any opera or exhibition. And 1947 saw the emergence of a new designer, Christian Dior, who was to change the direction of fashion overnight.

Bettina Ballard described Dior as a ‘pink-cheeked man with an air of baby plumpness still about him, and an almost desperate shyness augmented by a receding chin’. On 12 February 1947, the day he was due to present his first collection, he arrived early at 30 Avenue Montaigne, a beautiful hôtel particulier with an ornamental doorway which framed an awning on which his name was written in discreet black lettering.

The house was in a frenzy of activity. Workmen were still tacking down the carpet, and people ran around with armfuls of fresh flowers for the reception rooms. Behind the scenes, the mannequins tried to calm their nerves by concentrating on their make-up. The main salon and the little one beyond were crammed with gold chairs. On each chair was a name card, every one of which represented hours of minute adjustment so that every fashion editor and important guest should feel not only that they had been correctly placed, but also that they were sitting next to people of equal rank with whom they were on good terms.

No attempt had been made to drum up publicity, but Dior had powerful friends such as Comte Étienne de Beaumont, Marie-Louise Bousquet, Christian Bérard, and Michel de Brunhoff of Vogue. All had recognized Dior, from his work at Lelong, as a designer of prodigious talent. This had stirred up a great deal of excitement and curiosity about Dior’s new fashion house. The crush was so great that some people even attempted to get in through the top of the house with ladders.

At half past ten, with the salons full to overflowing, all was ready. Having greeted his guests, Dior escaped to the sanctuary of his office to endure his agony of nerves as far from the catwalk as possible. The very first model to step out was so agitated that she stumbled; and once off-stage she dissolved into mascara-blackened tears and was incapable of making another entry. But as each new dress appeared it was greeted with gasps of admiration and applause. Members of Dior’s staff kept bursting into his office to report each new success; but he could not quite believe what had happened until he emerged, to be given a thunderous standing ovation. Among the most enthusiastic was Carmel Snow of Harper’s Bazaar. ‘Your dresses have such a new look!’ she exclaimed – and so the name was born.

The clothes looked simple, but they were extremely complex in construction. The most famous dress of his first collection was ‘Bar’: a white shantung jacket, nipped in at the waist and exaggerating the curve of the hips, above a wide black pleated skirt. Dior’s favourite dress in the collection, however, was called ‘Chérie’: beneath a tight bodice and tiny waist, the skirt consisted of yard after yard of white faille. A rumour went round that Dior’s backer, Marcel Boussac, actively encouraged Dior’s extravagant use of cloth to boost his textile sales. Dior always hotly denied it, and pointed out that Boussac dealt mainly in cotton – a material for which he had very little use.

The impact of the show was astonishing, and reached far beyond the world of fashion. One old regular of the Jockey Club, M. de Lasteyrie, remarked that he had never heard a couturier’s name mentioned on the premises in the forty years he had been a member, but now ‘on ne parle que de Dior’.

Balmain, like Dior, had spent the early part of the war in the unoccupied zone, in his native Aix-les-Bains, where he had met Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. After they had returned to Paris, Balmain and Dior worked side by side, designing all the clothes that the house of Lucien Lelong produced, for Lelong himself never pretended to be a designer. Dior wrote: ‘Neither Balmain nor I will ever