"French Fashions Seen Through An Englishman's Eyes" (1947)

Every once in a while, towards the middle of last century, fashion magazines would stop to enquire, "What do men think about the latest women's styles"?  Here, for the enlightenment of its mostly female readership, is the version published in the November 1947 issue of Woman and Beauty.  (Drawings by Gruau.)

Top: Balmain.  Bottom: Christian Dior.

The  Paris collections were shown after the London ones, and a member of our fashion staff who was over there invited tall, dark, attractive Peter Jordon to  view them with her.  Director of a French news agency, he has been a journalist practically since the cradle.  Like most Englishmen he has never seen a dress show and found the first impact a little dazzling.

Hat by Christian Dior: Cocktail suit by Jacques Fath.

 However, he rallied swiftly and shook us by alleging that the figures of the professional mannequins weren't normal and that he much preferred Mr Cochran's Young Ladies!⃰  He thinks the latest Paris fashions beautiful, if a trifle too exotic for English life today.  Here are the ones he liked and why.

(⃰Mr Cochran's Young Ladies—a popular troupe of chorus girls at the time.)

Hat by Legroux: Suit by Jean Dessès.

So there we have it—the New Look at its newest and most shocking, and one man's reaction to it.

These types of articles continued to be published until the 1970s  (I own a splendid example where The Man on the Street is asked what he thinks of the midi-skirt!) but they faded out sometime in that decade.  I'll leave you to decide whether it was because fashion became so fractured that this kind of question became meaningless,  or because Women's Lib meant that women no longer cared what men in general thought about their clothes!