Turning Points

The 20th century is dotted with defining moments — when a trailblazing ‘look’ has disrupted the industry and pop culture at large. Amishi Parekh highlights a few that have endured even today

It is often said that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and that artists are those who steal in broad daylight from the masters. Although cliched, looking at the runways of today, one can still spot traces that pay homage to very specific, game-changing instances in fashion’s long and volatile history. While many were in-today, out-tomorrow (think of the pouf skirt craze a la Christian lacroix), others have endured and become part of the modern fashion vocabulary. These moments bear witness to the fact that many so-called trends aren’t seasonal, but cyclical, governed by the multitudes of (and, increasingly, by the converging and overlapping of) influences running through designers’ minds at a given point in time.

Manifest in a collection or a singular silhouette, they were not so much about the clothes but a new attitude. Just like the music, art and literature of a given period, the four examples that we have described here are a sign of their times — in each case almost like an armour for the woman of the day to stand out and stand up against subjugation.

CURVES AHEAD 

Reeling from a second world war, and after years of shortages, fabric rationing and monotonous uniforms, paris in 1947 was primed for a change. Forty-two-year-old designer Christian Dior had yet to make it big, and he presented his first collection with the simple intent to help women reclaim their femininity. ‘i wanted my dresses to be ‘constructed’, moulded on the curves of the female body whose contours they would stylise,’ he explained at the time. The audience watched 90 ensembles walk past, with dropped jaws; at last there was something to talk about, especially after such a dreary decade in French fashion.