The Return of the Natural Waist

Start the 1930s here, because the decade opens with one of the fastest silhouette reversals in modern fashion. Through most of the 1920s, the fashionable line was straight, loose, and dropped - a low waist sitting around the hips and a hemline that had crept up to the knee. Then, in the space of roughly two seasons around 1929-30, both of those things flipped. The waist climbed back up to where the body's actual waist is, and hemlines fell to mid-calf for day and all the way to the floor for evening.

The designer usually credited with the change is Jean Patou, whose autumn 1929 collection showed a natural waistline and longer skirts, but it spread through every Paris house so quickly that it's really better understood as a collective mood than one person's invention. It also happened to land just as the Wall Street crash of October 1929 was tipping the world into the Great Depression, which has led to a lot of tidy theories about hemlines falling with the markets. I'm a bit sceptical of those - the longer line was already on the runways before the crash - but it's fair to say the new silhouette suited the more sober mood that followed.

What I think is most interesting is how the new shape was built. Rather than returning to the boned, cinched waists of the Edwardian era, 1930s clothes defined the waist softly, with seaming, belts, and above all cut. Skirts were slim over the hips and flared toward the hem, often with godets set in, and the whole body was treated as one long, fluid line. You can see that logic in everything from the everyday house dress to the most expensive bias-cut evening gown. The flapper's boyish straight line was gone, and in its place was something longer, more grown-up, and far more interested in the shape of an actual body.