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replicahandbag on Thursday, December 10, 2009 12:32:29 AM
The idea of designer handbags were key: the timely ideals of etiquette, manners and poise all prevailed in fashion, too. Now, nobody dresses to look older than they are and, as the American designer Michael Kors says, "the time of day is disappearing": at a ball held by Dior at the Paris Ritz earlier this year, guests wore anything from full gowns to jeans with lots of diamonds. Today's style icons are women who mix it up well, such as Kate Moss, who is lauded for her ability to yoke together apparently disparate elements.
On the other hand, Grace Kelly's icy, blonde elegance in Rear Window (1954) still seems effortlessly fresh and has its modern-day replica handbag counterparts (Gwyneth Paltrow, the late Carolyn Bessette Kennedy), as does Bardot's smoky-eyed languid sultriness of the decade's later years. Aubrey Hepburn seems at once quintessentially mid-Fifties and yet also very now, with her gamine, knowing insouciance. Cecil Beaton, shooting her for Vogue in 1954, said: "Nobody ever looked like her before World War II...yet we recognize the rightness of this appearance in relation to our historical needs."
The greats of the Fifties - Dior, Balenciaga, Balmain, Jacques Fath - are still here, reincarnated. Dior, with John Galliano at the helm, continues to define what everyone wears, right down to the high street. Balenciaga has been brought back from many years of lull and is now the hottest ticket, with a Belgian designer, Nicolas Ghesquiere, in charge. The Balenciaga look once again defines the season - skinny black trousers, a military-inspired jacket, patchwork mini-dungarees, a brass-studded leather bag - anything trotted out by Ghesquiere spawns a thousand copies. Balmain is now couture only under Oscar de la Renta, whose first collection for the house last January was the epitome of refined, 16th arrondissement chic: neat little replica Balenciaga handbags suits, lots of navy and white. In some ways not too removed, in fact, from the Balmain of the Fifties, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. Fath is currently being rejuvenated at the hands of Lizzy Disney, a 30-year-old St Martins graduate from Sheffield.
Dior, then pretty much unknown, launched his "New Look" in 1947, which made the most of womanly features suppressed by Government-imposed restrictions during the war. Using corsetry and padding, Dior put exaggerated curves back at the centre of
Christian Louboutin Boots fashionable interest, dictating the shape of women's fashion well into the Fifties.
The influence of Cristobal Balenciaga, the Spaniard who set up his couture house in Paris in 1937, was more gradual. It is frequently said that the concept of unstructured yet tailored clothes originated with Balenciaga in the early Fifties.
The growth of a youth culture was crucial for the way in which everyone wore clothes; it seems bizarre, now, to think of a time that lacked a youth culture.