Icon: The Shirtwaist Dress in Good Housekeeping and other media

Presented at Women in Magazines Conference at Kingston University, London, on 22-23 June 2012

Today’s period films typically show the 1950s housewife in the uniform of her profession: a shirtwaist dress.  The shirtwaist itself encompasses the 1950s ideal of conformity and domesticity with a variety of media reinforcing these notions over time.  In the 1950s magazines, television, books, and films all had varying degrees of influence over women’s fashion choices.

Magazines, however, had the strongest influence at the inception of the 1950s shirtwaist style, just after World War II.  Historian and documentary filmmaker David Halberstam explains, “Women turned to magazines to learn how to adapt to their new roles in the land of plenty.” Good Housekeeping was a practical lifestyle magazine that women utilized to inform and influence their fashion decisions. Good Housekeeping’s position and reputation sold women the 1950s shirtwaist and the idealized figure it came to represent.  Tracing the path of the shirtwaist—from its pre-war form, to the 1947 New Look revision by Haute Couture designer Christian Dior, to its gradual appearance in this new form in Good Housekeeping—shows the beginnings of its development as an icon.  Its presentation in both magazines and other media caused the style to permanently represent idealized motherhood and domesticity in the American mind.

Just prior to Dior’s New Look, the 1940s “wartime shirtwaister” was prevalent.  Author Angela Partington explains that this version was based on the Utility look.[i] It focused the silhouette on “square shoulders and short, straight skirts,” which is just the reverse of the soft, rounded shape of the New Look.  This Utility style shirtwaist was popular and appeared in advertisements in American magazines such as Good Housekeeping, Seventeen, and Mademoiselle in early 1947.

Many of these dresses appeared as golf or other sporting related clothing due to their comfort and practicality. Partington explains that the Utility look remained popular via the shirtwaist, but acknowledges that it changed form.  “The wartime shirtwaister[s] . . . flourished in the form of 1950s dresses which became almost symbolic of the housewife, and were invariably used to dress her in advertisements for household goods”.

Christian Dior’s influence on the iconic 1950s shirtwaist began with his New Look collection in the spring of 1947 that almost single-handedly defined the post-war silhouette.  Although other designers such as Claire McCardell were working with similar skirt shapes at the time, the fashion media credited Dior with the inception of the “New Look.”

While Dior did influence ready-to-wear styles, it is incorrect to say that his version merely “trickled down.”[ii] If anything, an opposite scenario caused the shirtwaists popularity. Dior took the already well-established form of the shirtwaist and created a new, haute couture version. As noted by Harold Koda and Richard Martin, Dior had a, “willingness to work with an established form but to complicate its construction and render it idiosyncratic”. The new style then slowly began to influence all price points and classes to create the new form, while obliterating the old one.