Bazaar: The Definition Of Fashion

The magazine enters a golden age of fashion, photography, and literary genius.

- Stephen Mooallem

By the early 1950s, Harper’s Bazaar was well into what Christian Dior would refer to as “the golden age” of fashion. It was an era that Dior himself helped jolt into being with the unveiling, in February 1947, of his “New Look.” “Swirling skirts. Pleats and pleats. Dior makes a skirt 45 yards wide,” Bazaar raved in the October 1947 issue, marveling at Dior’s quasi libertine use of material, coming as it did on the heels of wartime fabric rationing. It was a boon for couture, as Paris reclaimed its place as the seat of high fashion; the houses of Balenciaga, Balmain, and Fath were all flourishing. And more designers were following in the footsteps of Chanel and Schiaparelli, and branching out into fragrances, boutiques, and licensing deals.

Back in the United States, the country was awash in a wave of prosperity. But in the wake of World War II, a lot of the old mythologies about what to desire and how to live were breaking down. There was also a burgeoning interest in the existentialist writings of Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Albert Camus, and the American Beats like Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs. Nuclear weapons were being developed, the Cold War was brewing, a counterculture was forming, and McCarthyism was in full force.

Bazaar rebounded from the uncertainty of the war years with a vengeance. Carmel Snow’s cool eminence, Diana Vreeland’s wild imagination, and Alexey Brodovitch’s creative genius are all by now the stuff of lore, and the magazine they made together was once again the definition of fashion. But they didn’t do it alone.