CRUZ, Nicole

PH 103 – U

Chanel and Dior: The Common Thread

Paris was the birth home of many longstanding luxury fashion houses such as Chanel,
Lanvin, Dior, and Louis Vuitton. These brands carry within them rich histories and narratives that
are still being shared up to this day. Among the many sartorial giants, Chanel and Dior are two of
the most famous French brands.
The founders of these two French fashion houses were, respectively, Coco Chanel and
Christian Dior. The two were in close competition during the years after World War II but they
had varied fashion philosophies.
Before delving into these differences and eventually, their similarities, it is important to
contextualize the two fashion houses’ philosophies.
Coco Chanel began her work as a designer in the early 1920’s, with the year 1925 as the
peak of her success. Before her time as a designer, fashions during the fin-de-siecle were highly
ornamented, highly layered, and very high maintenance. It was a time when wearing a corset was
a woman’s obligation. Many designers responded to such excessiveness by designing minimal
outfits. One of the pioneers was Paul Poiret who promoted a new minimalist style within the elite
world of haute couture1. Coco Chanel, who was quite the radical herself, naturally responded by
following suit. Instead of the petticoats, lace, and froufrou that was propagated during her time,
she opted for relaxed silhouettes, straight lines, and cuts that didn’t constrain the body.
It was a time when la femme moderne was a term for women who deviated from norms.
According to Roberts, there was a phenomenon when girls all cut their hair short, leaving their
families shocked and dismayed.2 Coco Chanel was one of these girls and it is this spirit that her
brand imbibes. For her, the modern woman’s clothes should be “comfortable, practical, and
compatible with an active life”. A second element of her philosophy would be the “poor look” or
pauvrete de luxe which Poiret himself jested. It was a total shift from the delicate ruffles, long
hems, and lace of yesteryears. Chanel made straight cut clothes using jersey and used neutral colors
in her initial designs. The third element of her design philosophy would be masculinity. Chanel
gravitated towards certain details of the men’s clothes during her time and decided it would lend
comfort and ease to women’s clothing. And so, she incorporated ties, tailored jackets, and even
trousers.

1
Mary Louise Roberts, “Samson and Delilah Revisited: The Politics of Women’s Fashion in 1920s France,” The
American Historical Review 98, no. 3 (June 1993): 657–84.
2
Roberts.
 The social implications of Chanel’s “poor”, “masculine”, and modern movement were
plenty. Just as how her own radical point of views liberated her, Chanel’s fashion movement
liberated the women during her time. These modern women took a stand against the constricting
norms of their time and embraced the idea of “mobility in social spaces”. 3 These women were
unknowingly craving for social liberation, but Chanel’s fashions helped unleash that
consciousness.
The house of Christian Dior was established in 1947. The post-World War II period left
France still in recovery mode. The country was still living off rations until the year 1949. In
contrast with Chanel’s time (who had experienced war as well), women’s post-war clothing after
WWIII was slightly masculine and structured, reminiscent of the war that had ended and the
military clothes that were worn by men and women alike (because women were employed in
offices when the men were off in battle). It was a time when women’s fashions were very rigid
and boxy and even the shoes were square-pointed and square-heeled. How did Christian Dior
respond? With a sense of hyper femininity. Dior stirred excitement amongst the Parisian fashion
scene in 1947 with his designs that accentuated the female figure. According to McAuley, Dior
said, “In December 1946, as a result of the war and uniforms, women still looked and dressed like
Amazons. But I designed clothes for flower-like women, with rounded shoulders, full feminine
busts, and hand-spun waists above enormous spreading skirts.”4 This was coined “The New Look”
by the fashion media who all commended Dior for bringing back renewed excitement for shapes,
volume, and subtle sensuality.
Dior’s New Look was pivotal in the way that Chanel’s boyish clothes liberated women of
their time. Dior’s hyper feminine silhouettes, the use of a lot of luxurious fabrics, and the affinity
for the extravagant signaled a divided society that was different from the pre-war time wherein
women of all social classes wore the same thing. According to Tomes, the designer wanted to
create an air of prosperity and new vitality by harking back to the “good old days” when women
had the opportunity to revel in luxury.5 In this sense, Dior’s designs represented social fantasies.
To summarize Chanel and Dior’s different philosophies: Chanel’s works were geared
towards loose silhouettes by use of masculine detailing and tailoring. On the other hand, Dior
preferred to embrace and emphasize the female form by reverting to a little maximalism. Chanel
as a realist because she considered the lifestyle of women during that time and created clothes that
facilitated that “active” and “mobile” lifestyle. Dior was an idealist who created an illusion of
prosperity by giving women a fashion fantasy they could live in.
The two brands may be different from each other, but there are some elements of Christian
Dior’s design philosophy that emerged from that of Chanel’s.

3
Roberts.
4
James McAuley, “How Christian Dior Rescued Paris from Its Postwar Misery,” Washington Post, July 5, 2017,
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/how-christian-dior-rescued-paris-from-its-postwar-
misery/2017/07/05/858eb506-5ab5-11e7-aa69-3964a7d55207_story.html.
5
Jan Tomes, “The New Look: How Christian Dior Revolutionized Fashion 70 Years Ago,” DW.COM, February 10,
2017, https://www.dw.com/en/the-new-look-how-christian-dior-revolutionized-fashion-70-years-ago/a-
37491236.
 The first would be the use of lines to create oneness and fluidity. Below, Dior’s
groundbreaking Bar Jacket of 1947 is contrasted with Chanel’s tweed jacket. Where Chanel used
lines to move clothes away from the body, as seen in the straight cuts and loose silhouette, Dior
used lines to create an hourglass figure and a look that was voluminous and shapely. On a
fundamental level, it can be said that Dior emerged from Chanel’s good sense of sartorial whole—
seeing a woman’s outfit not simply as pieces put together but as one coherent whole that is well
thought out. According to Saisselin, this sense of wholeness was not always prevalent in the
fashion industry, let alone in society in general.6 The idea that fashion is seen as one cohesive
whole is a result of one’s concept of the woman. For example, before the 1920’s ornamentation
and details were king, and Saisselin explains that this was due to people’s understanding that
“woman precedes essence”. There was already a concept of what a woman should be like, thus it
was only necessary to add details and fluff. It was only when the woman was seen in non-
essentialist terms that fashion began to form its roots and to be seen as something more than just
“extra fabric”.
And so, despite the difference in aesthetics (Dior as hyper feminine while Chanel was
sporty and masculine), Chanel’s understanding of fashion as a whole—fashion that can be curated
and orchestrated (this is probably why the term ensemble is used to refer to an outfit)—emerged
very strikingly in Dior’s design philosophy. For Dior, fashion was about crafting a look; about
using clothes to craft and shape the idea of what being a woman is all about. It was never just about
adding a little more fabric and detailing.

6
Rémy Saisselin, “From Baudelaire to Christian Dior: The Poetics of Fashion,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art
Criticism 18, no. 1 (September 1959): 109–15.
 Figure 1: Coco Chanel’s iconic suit Figure 1 Christian Dior’s New Look

The second emerging element prevails in the same spirit as the first one. Chanel’s tweed
jacket and Dior’s Bar Jacket were designed with clever use of lines, but this strategy came from
an understanding of the female form and of femininity in general. Chanel may have wanted to free
the female form by giving it more space to move about, but this did not mean that she did not want
to celebrate femininity. On the contrary, she reinforced the idea that being feminine does not
require froufrou. In this sense, Chanel saw the female form as adaptive, and femininity, malleable.
This emerged in Dior’s philosophy. Dior understood the female form as well but interpreted it in
a different way. He understood the outlines of a woman’s body—the curves of the bust, waist,
hips, and slender legs. Instead of hiding the female form, Dior liberated it in the way that
highlighted the figure itself. He celebrated femininity by celebrating the female form.
This thinking may seem very common, but it is not and that’s how Chanel emerged in Dior.
In Dior’s time, there were other designers who created beautiful clothes but did not understand the
woman herself. There were those who created couture and those who mass-produced, but no one
created clothes that embraced the female figure in the simple way that Dior did. For example,
Spanish couturier Cristobal Balenciaga was also a designer during the post-World War II period
and was Dior’s “rival”. However, Balenciaga’s couture—with its maximal elegance and
excessiveness—seemed to hark back to the froufrou of yesteryears with the clothes’ big balloon
shapes. That’s how Dior became revolutionary (the same way that Chanel was during her time)—
he trimmed away unnecessary details by focusing on the female figure.
 With this understanding of woman comes the third
emerging element. As mentioned earlier, Christian Dior
was surrounded by contemporaries who were creating
clothes with the mindset that fashion was wearable art (note
that this does not invalidate Dior’s designs as art, too).
Chanel had contemporaries as well such as Elsa
Schiaparelli, an Italian designer famous for her surrealist
clothes with a trompe l’oeil aesthetic—designs that “trick
the eye” with their images. It can be said that Dior’s
philosophy emerged from Chanel’s in this way. Saisselin
explains that such a phenomenon existed in fashion: there
are those who think that the woman is a blank canvas, and
fashion is the paint.7 There are those, like Chanel and Dior,
who believe that “fashion is a symptom”. Fashion is
thought of as symptomatic of things inherent in the woman,
like a woman’s ideals and values for example.
During Chanel’s time, as explained earlier, clothes
Figure 2: A sample of Balenciaga’s designs
were add-ons until she decided that clothes should be a part
of a woman’s lifestyle. Clothes can be a mode of
expression. This spirit emerged in Dior’s philosophy by way of his designs that were a good mix
of utility and sartorial appeal. His clothes, one could say, were a balance between Chanel’s
functionality and Balenciaga’s couture.
In summary, Christian Dior’s fashion house emerged from Coco Chanel’s philosophy
because he deemed it necessary to respond to his contemporaries in the same way albeit
unconsciously. Chanel’s spirit prevailed even after the second World War and Dior tapped into
this spirit to uplift the women during his time who felt they existed in a somber limbo. The years
after Chanel (the period of the 1920’s and 1930’s) had grown sartorially stagnant with the straight
lines and cuts becoming too basic and cookie cutter. Chanel’s freeing sense of femininity had
become stale and “too masculine” amplified by the mood of the Great Depression in the 1920’s-
1930’s. It was from this context that Christian Dior emerged because he believed that there came
a point within that period when the joyous, vivacious sense of femininity had grown dim. In the
same way that Coco Chanel liberated women by freeing their bodies, Christian Dior liberated
women by allowing them the luxury of embracing their female figures. Dior’s response to his
contemporaries sparked new ideas about femininity that isn’t far from that of Chanel’s: Fashion
does not comprise the woman. Clothes are a mode of expression where the woman does the talking.

7
Saisselin.
BIBLIOGRAPHY

McAuley, James. “How Christian Dior Rescued Paris from Its Postwar Misery.” Washington
Post, July 5, 2017. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/how-christian-dior-rescued-
paris-from-its-postwar-misery/2017/07/05/858eb506-5ab5-11e7-aa69-
3964a7d55207_story.html.
Roberts, Mary Louise. “Samson and Delilah Revisited: The Politics of Women’s Fashion in
1920s France.” The American Historical Review 98, no. 3 (June 1993): 657–84.
Saisselin, Rémy. “From Baudelaire to Christian Dior: The Poetics of Fashion.” The Journal of
Aesthetics and Art Criticism 18, no. 1 (September 1959): 109–15.
Tomes, Jan. “The New Look: How Christian Dior Revolutionized Fashion 70 Years Ago.”
DW.COM, February 10, 2017. https://www.dw.com/en/the-new-look-how-christian-dior-
revolutionized-fashion-70-years-ago/a-37491236.