Divine Elegance: A Feminist Semiotic Analysis of Christian Dior’s “New Lookâ€

This study explores the intersection of art, culture, and religion in Christian Dior’s iconic 1947 “New Look†Bar Suit through an intersectional feminist semiotic lens. The research addresses how fashion, as a cultural text, embodies and negotiates religious and cultural meanings whilst acknowledging the complexities of women’s agency in post-war society. Through multi-perspectival feminist semiotic analysis incorporating intersectional and postcolonial viewpoints, this study examines how the Bar Suit articulates womanhood across diverse cultural contexts. The Bar Suit’s silhouette with its cinched waist, full skirt, and structured jacket functions as a site of contested meanings, simultaneously invoking Christian ideals of feminine virtue and challenging wartime austerity through material excess. The methodology involves close reading of archival materials, contemporary women’s testimonies, and comparative analysis with female designers of the era. This triangulated approach reveals how the Bar Suit operated differently across class, racial, and national boundaries, with particular attention to its reception in colonial and post-colonial contexts. Findings suggest that the Bar Suit’s religious symbolism manifested through its cathedral-like silhouette and ritualistic construction created a complex negotiation space where women could embody both submission and resistance. The suit’s global dissemination reinforced Western fashion hegemony while simultaneously being reinterpreted through local cultural frameworks.