THE 1950s: SUBURBAN CLAUSTROPHOBIA

Christian Dior presented the New Look in February 1947. The fashion press called it revolutionary. The fabric-rationing board called it irresponsible. Women who had spent the war years in utility clothing and then been handed a skirt that required fifteen yards of material to construct had a more complicated reaction.

The 1950s New Look is the decade's defining visual language: the nipped waist, the full skirt, the white gloves, the pearls. It is also, and this is the part that makes it genuinely interesting, a fashion that contains its own critique. The perfection is too perfect. The composure is too composed. The woman who wears it looks exactly right and slightly trapped, and you're not sure whether that's the point or the accident.

Sylvia Plath wrote The Bell Jar in 1963, set in 1953. The clothes are not incidental. They are the container. These images try to find both things simultaneously: the extraordinary craft of the era's tailoring, and the very quiet pressure it placed on the bodies inside it.