Text VII Romantic style

By the late 1950s London couturiers faced problems on three fronts. First, how to survive the evident and inexorable decline in private clientele; second, how to tackle increasing rivalry from flourishing model houses; and third, how to deal with the powerful revival of Paris couture occasioned by the triumph of the New Look in 1947.The Incorporated Society of London Fashion Designers mounted a strong export campaign both during and immediately after the war. The dramatic yet charming bustle-backed Victor Stiebel dress, made up in green-and yellow silk grosgrain with narrow horizontal stripes, dates from this period.

London had faced competition from Paris since the establishment of court dressmaking in eighteenth-century London, but by 1947 it posed a severe threat. The bad odour caused by the continuation of couture activities under Nazi occupation had been so skillfully dispelled that the Paris industry was able to reassert its manufacturing strength and overwhelming dominance of international style only two years alter the end of the Second World War. By the early 1950s Paris couture was once again on the scale of a major national industry. Dior employed 1,200 staff in 1955 and by 1959 the Paris couture industry had 5,000 full-time workers, with a further 3,000 employed on a part-time basis. In comparison, in July 1952 Hardy Amies, who along with Hartnell ran the most successful London establishments, employed 120 sewing- hands and engaged 180 others in workshops.

A number of stylish and well-off British women deliberately opted for the higher cachet carried by the purchase of Paris couture. Lady Tavistock, only daughter of a rich banker, recalled her mother giving her some very pretty clothes from Paris. We went over and got them from Balmain. But to see or buy French couture it was not even necessary to go to Paris. Dior put on his first fashion show in London at the Savoy Hotel in April 1950; Balmain put on his first London show in August of the same year. These events were part of the aggressive international marketing policy of the French haute couture industry, which from 1947 regularly toured collections all over the world. Paris couture clothes were also sold at London branch houses and, by the mid-1950s, even manufactured in London under licence. Fortunately for London couturiers, British audiences admired the glamour of Paris evening dresses but often the pure sense of modern elegance combined with the prices (a Givenchy could cost ₤900) were too much for them, as Picture Post reported on 19 November 1955.

Wedding dresses provided London's couture houses with an opportunity to counter Paris competition. For the design of Princess Margaret's wedding dress in 1961 Norman Hartnell was allowed a great deal of creative freedom, an occasion he seems to have relished. He produced a perfectly simple white dress, an archetypal romantic revival style, with a very full crinoline skirl; watchers gasped at its beauty. In the same year, a Miss Hewison's wedding dress, now in the V&A was made at the London salon of Worth in the more formal style, with delicate embroidery in fleur-de-lis motifs. Hartnell's wedding dress for Mrs. H.S. Ball was more formally trained and beaded, in 1957. The very last wedding dress that Victor Stiebel designed, the farewell dress for his retirement collection in spring/summer 1963, was made in splendid moiré silk.

As the older designers faded, new stars rose. In 1970 Jean Muir produced one of her characteristically simple and supremely elegant designs for the wedding dress of Pamela, Lady Harlech, in cream-coloured linen featuring appliquéd Celtic motifs.

A series of major cultural, political and economic shifts had been taking place in British society. The late 1950s have been described as a moment marking a profound shift in the cultural life of the nation, a watershed around which a series of significant "before and after” contrasts can be drawn. One such watershed took place on the 17 November, 1957 when the Lord Chamberlain announced that the Queen would no longer be receiving debutantes individually at court.