Christian Dior gave the V&A a Bar suit its record dates as possibly made 1955, and the Met's Bar skirt is a 1969 edition
Christian Dior's Bar suit at the V&A, T.376&A-1960, is the object that stands for the 1947 New Look, and its own catalogue entry dates its making to 1955, possibly. The museum asked the house for a typical New Look costume; Christian Dior Paris, 30 Avenue Montaigne, sent a jacket, skirt and hat in 1960. The file records that the suit may be a 1950s remake made for Dior's August 1955 lecture on the aesthetics of fashion at the Sorbonne, where a repeat of Bar was shown, and that the Willy Maywald photograph of Renee on the Seine, the one the textbooks print as 1947, has been dated 1955 by the Maywald Archive. A Canadian fashion museum reads the hat and the stiletto in that image as 1957 and calls the whole thing a tenth-anniversary marketing picture. Either way, not 1947. The object itself, per the record: a hip-length jacket in natural tussore silk, corseted, hips padded, three self-covered buttons; a fully pleated black wool crepe skirt mounted on a stiffened taffeta petticoat, the waistband quilted to throw the waist out from the hips. New York's Bar is split too. The Met's jacket, C.I.58.34.30, is spring/summer 1947, given by Mrs. John Chambers Hughes in 1958. Its skirt, C.I.69.40, is catalogued 1947, edition spring/summer 1969, a gift of Christian Dior (@dior). Two museums, one 1947 design, and the house's own re-editions doing much of the work in the case.