The 'Mozart' dress by Dior, photographed by Norman Parkinson in April 1950 for American Vogue. Anne Hollander writes persuasively and at length about this picture in Fabric of Vision published by Yale University Press in 2002. I became Anne Hollander's fan back in 1978 when she published Seeing Through Clothes. One of the first prominent art historian to focus her career on the significance of clothing and fashion in the arts.
"Here the outdoor sun floods the front of the figure so brightly that we can see the details of the dress only as it sweeps back into the dimness inside the fine room – the moth-like lady in her ballgown seems to have sought the light. She rests her face against her folded hands and leans against the window-frame, gazing downwards from the empty salon at the sunlit world. This dress, too, is of its own moment, showing the most startling innovation for ball-dresses in the middle of the twentieth century. The entirely strapless bodice had not been thought of before 1938, when the underwear to support it was being invented: and this image from about a dozen years later shows it fully developed by Christian Dior. The modern decolletage entirely frees the arms and armpits, so that they now join the shoulders, bosom and back to make a single exposed element, crowned by the head. Here the photographer shows all of this to great advantage. The dress seems to sweep upwards, concentrating its spread flounces closer and closer together, gradually narrowing and tightening to whittle the waist, and finally producing the bust, arms and head as one extravagant flower at the top, balancing the big petals below. The dress is photographed more for atmospheric effects than to show its exact structure. Only its fusion with the woman wearing it is patent and perfect and suggestive, along with the fusion of her shoe and foot in the left foreground – no other aspect of the picture is so potent. The result produces not a desire to own the dress, but to be the woman in the photograph, capable of arousing fantasy in spectators – that is, to be the imaginative achievement of an artist, who has given dimension to the practical achievement of a dressmaker, and produced this image of a woman whose being, of unknown scope, is identified with her elegance. Superior fashion photography such as this depends on women's continuing belief that such dresses can rightly create them, can free them to be themselves, as Cinderella became her true self at the ball."
