“Dress Silhouette Returns to Normal.” As headlines go, this seems a pretty innocuous one. But not so for WWD columnist D.L.W., who, in 1959, took exception to the word “normal” as well as the accompanying article which detailed “a return to conservatism.”
“The joy of fashion is just that we do not set a norm,” she wrote on January 2. “And ‘conservatism’ as such has rarely been a characteristic of fashions created by trend-setting designers. Of course we say, ‘Mrs. So and So, on the best dressed list for the third year, is known as a conservative dresser.’ But this statement does not imply that Mrs. So and So dresses unimaginatively, which I take to be the implication of the reporter discussing ‘normal’ silhouettes.” While she conceded that the terms “safety” and “safe sellers” were common retail-speak, D.L.W. noted that “just as there is no one ‘normal’ woman, so there is no one normal silhouette. What’s normal for one era of fashion looks p-r-e-t-t-y abnormal to eyes of a later generation.
“Once we permit ourselves to seek solely for ‘normal’ fashions, we’ve cooked our own goose,” she continued. “Life blood of fashion business is precisely those deviations, those experiments, which are not normal. How can we know, until we try, that something new has possibilities of becoming the future ‘normal?’”