Paris, Maison Dior, February 12, 1947: Out stepped the models, walking very fast, whirling in the crowded room with provocative swinging movements, knocking over ashtrays with the huge flare of their skirts as the name of each outfit was announced—Amoureuse, Pompon, Caprice. The women attending Christian Dior's first New Look collection, who were wearing the frugal clothes imposed on them since the war years—short, narrow skirts and boxy jackets—started applauding early in the show and kept on applauding right through the final ovation. They were being treated to an opulent femininity that had not been seen in fashion for many years: sumptuous excesses of fabric; luxuriously wide hemlines swooping to eight inches below the knee; soft-shouldered, full-bosomed tops accentuating tiny, cinched-in waists.

After the performance, the audience clamored to meet the collection's little-known designer—Christian Dior, a baldish, portly forty-two-year-old with a sad little smile, who resembled, in the words of one of his friends, "a bland country curate made out of pink marzipan." The praise lavished on this shy, reclusive Frenchman was unequalled in the history of dressmaking: an American fan described Dior as "a Napoleon, an Alexander the Great, a Caesar of the couture." Harper's Bazaar's Carmel Snow, who coined the term New Look, declared, "Dior saved Paris as Paris was saved in the Battle of the Marne." The demand for garments was so enormous that for some time the salon at 30 Avenue Montaigne had to be kept open past midnight. "My God, what have I done?" Dior exclaimed to an associate shortly after his first showing, and he burst into tears.

His winter collection, held in August of that year, featured gowns whose wasp-waisted skirts measured as much as forty yards in circumference, and it drew the same acclaim. The designer was to repeat this kind of ecstatic success twice a year for a decade—until the eve of his death. He dressed the world's most glamorous women: Rita Hayworth, Zizi Jeanmaire, Olivia de Havilland, Marlene Dietrich. Crowds of hundreds met him at airports as he travelled through Europe and the Americas, opening boutiques and publicizing his perfumes. (For decades, Miss Dior would remain one of the best-selling fragrances in the world.) In 1949, seventy-five per cent of all French fashion exports bore Dior labels, and Dior products amounted to five per cent of the total volume of French export sales.

Nearly a half century after Dior’s initial triumph, I sit in a storeroom of the Metropolitan Museum's Costume Institute, admiring a creation of his called Chérie. It is a cocktail dress of very thin navy-blue taffeta—the most ethereal blue imaginable, only a speck darker than the iridescent plumage of a pheasant's neck. A pivotal model of Dior's 1947 collection, it has a demurely simple, round-bosomed top and a skirt made of thirteen-and-a-half yards of that luminous blue taffeta; the fabric, knife-pleated and tucked into Chérie's twenty-inch waist with wizardly craftsmanship, flares into a huge circular hemline, which gives the outfit the shape of an inverted Martini glass.

Chérie is currently being readied for an exhibition, to open on December 12th at the Costume Institute, that will celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Christian Dior's New Look. And as I examined its cunning styling—the minuscule waistband that so ably exaggerates the fullness of bust and padded hips—I was filled with ambivalent emotions of recollected pleasure and stern reproach. It was not so much the archaic coquetry of the dress I was questioning as, rather, the collective past self of my generation: the high-school and college girls of the early nineteen-fifties who had enthusiastically capitulated to the Dior style; who had laced themselves, groaning, into the torturous waist cinches demanded by the likes of Chérie; and who had turned their backs on almost five decades of fashion that had gradually unfettered women's bodies.

For just think of the liberating styles that preceded Dior's counter-revolution: the abolition of corsets which was championed by the suffragette movement and was pioneered, as far back as 1906, by Poiret; the athletic androgyny expressed in the flapper look of the nineteen-twenties; the novel image of the working woman incarnated in the fluid, casual clothes of the visionary Chanel. All these tokens of emancipation had been cancelled overnight by a so-called New Look, which in fact turned out to be the dumbest misnomer in the history of finery. It turned the clock back to the restrictive folderol of La Belle Époque, and evoked alarmingly regressive models of femaleness: women as passive sex objects, displayers of their men's wealth and status—women who needed to be helped into cabs, who required huge trunks in order to travel with their finery, and maids to help them dress. Dior's first collections included daytime outfits that weighed eight pounds and evening dresses that weighed sixty and were said by their wearers to be too heavy even to dance in. How could we have ever submitted to such nonsense? the feminist in me was now raging.

But very soon my annoyance gave way to a wistful compassion. I realized that as my peers and I admired Dior's New Look in our mothers' magazines, and later recaptured our great-grandmothers' art of breathing in while lacing ourselves into hourglass shapes, we did not yet have the perspective to feel any qualms about its message. Indeed, in the nineteen-fifties we were aware of only one dimension of the Dior craze: its exacerbated femininity sprang from Dior’s desire to return French style to its "traditions of great luxury." Luxury in 1947 was both a form of exorcism and an economic imperative: exorcism of the privations and constraints imposed upon the West by the Second World War, and an ambitious attempt to restore France to its centuries-old role of the capital of Western style. As Dior himself suggested, a tad flippantly, "Europe had tired of dropping bombs and now wanted to let off a few fireworks."

Such were some of the thoughts that came to me this fall, as I examined Chérie and other memorable pieces of Dior’s first collections, such as the cocktail outfit called Bar, an exuberantly peplumed ivory shantung jacket topping a ten-yard swoop of finely pleated black wool, or Venus, a strapless, tightly corseted ball gown of sequinned dove-gray tulle descending into falls of multilayered, scallop-shaped flounces. These are some of the sublimely ephemeral garments that catapulted a modest, retiring Frenchman to such swift fame that by 1949 a Gallup poll ranked Dior as one of the five most famous people in the world.

In Christian's late teens, Dior père adamantly vetoed his son's wish to pursue a vocation in the arts. Then, after Christian, with the halfhearted notion of becoming a diplomat, gratified his family by spending a few years at the École Libre des Sciences Politiques, M. Dior agreed to subsidize a small gallery in which his son could satisfy his passion for contemporary art. But in the early nineteen-thirties Dior’s father lost all his money, and Christian had to earn a living. He worked briefly as a fashion illustrator and then found employment as a designer with Robert Piguet, a popular couturier now best remembered for his heady perfume Fracas.

In 1939, the war and Army conscription briefly interrupted Dior’s bright career in couture. Upon resuming to Paris, in 1941, he was hired as a designer by Lucien Lelong; within a few years, he had so radically rejuvenated Lelong's styles that an American editor resuming to Europe to cover the collections asked to meet the bright new star behind the scenes. Her enthusiasm heightened Dior's hopes of opening his own couture house. An immensely wealthy backer took interest—the textile magnate Marcel Boussac. Dior's nascent enterprise, which thrived on a lavish use of fabric, was founded in a spacious town house at 30 Avenue Montaigne, where it stands to this day.

While working for Elle in Paris in the nineteen-fifties, I occasionally met Dior at his couture house and at social gatherings. I remember the way his plump pink head doddered gently from side to side as he talked, the way he folded his hands over his belly, like a meek Benedictine monk, as he listened to you intently. Equally memorable was his aura of selfless modesty and kindness. He was legendary for the democratic courtliness he displayed toward his hundreds of employees: he spent months choosing the right Christmas gift for each one of them, and he always stepped aside with a small bow to allow the lowliest apprentice to enter the elevator before him. Equally unchanging were his idiosyncrasies: an incurable lust for large quantities of very rich food; a constant need to be surrounded by a small circle of intimates, which included Jean Cocteau, Christian Bérard, the composers Georges Auric and Francis Poulenc, and Raymonde Zehnacker, the directrice of his design studio; and an obsessive reliance on a noted Paris clairvoyant, Mme. Delahaye. It was Mme. Delahaye who advised him to accept Boussac's offer to fund his couture house, and through the years she went on to forecast the most propitious dates for his travels, and even which Paris florist should create the lavish bouquets he craved for his salon and his homes.

"The press covers Dior as if he were a war" was a statement often heard during the nineteen-fifties. One of the paradoxes of the Dior phenomenon, well described by his biographer, was that this mild-mannered, very private man attracted notice more skillfully than the most aggressive publicity hound. The innovations he brought to couture had less to do with his designs than with his showmanship. He pioneered a brand-new way of presenting clothes, and set a radical new pace of stylistic change. During my stint at Elle, I never fantasized about owning a Dior gown; compared with the regal Balenciagas and delectably supple Chanels that I secretly craved, his clothes struck me as archaically "seizième" and "Dadame," euphemisms for "ultra-decorous" and "dowdy." But I was continually dazzled by the sheer theatricality of his presentations: the liturgical drama of his hushed, pale-gray-and-gilt salon redolent of the hot, dry smell of Diorissimo: the zip and pace and seductiveness with which his models strutted through the room as the name of each invention was called out—"Numéro Un, Verdi!" "Numéro Deux, Pergolesi!" "Numéro Trois, Wagner!" These two-hour spectacles, which broke sharply with the demure, slow-paced couture showings of prewar days, were the forerunners of today's raucous catwalk extravaganzas. After the traditional bridal-gown finale, the Master would part the gray velvet curtain of the cabine and wave shyly to his vociferous fans. "Sublime!" they would call out. "The best you've ever done!" He never once let them down.

Equally crucial to Dior's genius as a publicist and showman (King Barnum, some called him) was the velocity of his transformations. He was the first designer to alter hemlines and basic shapes radically from one collection to the next, thus forcing his fashions to go out of fashion each year, and creating an unprecedented rush of headlines and consumer frenzy. He gave the press an extra hook by inventing a catchphrase for each of his collections: the 1947 Corolla line was followed by the Sinuous line, the Oblique line, the Tulip line, the H line, the particularly popular A line—a softly flaring shape described by Vogue as "the prettiest triangle since Pythagoras."

These relentless innovations were bound to make some enemies. The Diorophobia provoked by "THE GREAT HEMLINE HULLABALOO" or "THE BATTLE OF THE BARE CALF," as the press billed two of his semiannual mutations, was particularly rampant among American men. An indignant male from Idaho accused him of having "disfigured my wife." "Stay out of Topeka, you bum," another irate gent, in Kansas, wrote. There was also dissent from a few of his colleagues. The habitually aloof Balenciaga admitted that he was appalled by the way Dior treated textiles—backing them with multilayers of canvas, buckram, or tulle, rather than "letting fabric speak for itself," which was the pith of his own aesthetic credo. But the most violent censure of all came from Chanel, who declared, "Dior? He doesn't dress women, he upholsters them."

Every male designer seems to have a particular Muse, an ideal woman for whom he designs his fantasies. Pochna argues convincingly that Dior's Muse was his fastidiously elegant mother, the haunting beauty in rustling skirts who kissed him good night in the early years of the century. His entire oeuvre, the author intimates, was a form of Oedipal regression, re-creating not only his mother but all those women "muffled in furs, with gestures à la Boldini," who had left him with "the memory of their perfumes."

With equal sensitivity, Pochna describes the anxiety that Dior experienced during those two successive periods of each year when he prepared his collections. For the first several days, he shut himself up in the study of one of his country houses, near Fontainebleau or in Provence, seeing no one except a domestic who brought him his meals on a tray. Sitting at a desk, Dior drew tentative outlines on a large pad: indulging in a kind of hieroglyphic reverie, he doodled aimlessly until a moment came when he suddenly had a "flash" that revealed the principal silhouette of his next collection. During these anguished days, half a dozen of his assistants would sit downstairs, waiting nervously for his reappearance. When, at last, he came out of his quarters, holding hundreds of sheets of paper, they cheered and then carefully perused his handiwork.

Obsessive perfectionism is needed by any great couturier—in this art of nuances a quarter inch can spell the difference between a triumph and a disaster—and that is taxing enough. But another of Dior's revolutions was to internationalize fashion. Within a few years of his first triumph, Dior salons flourished in London, New York, and Caracas, and Dior felt impelled to evolve scores of designs specifically suited to each of them, taking into account the cultural propensities and the average bodily proportions of his clients abroad. In short, Maison Dior had to create around a thousand designs a year.