Ah the wiggle dress. That mighty little garment that allows the wearer to flex her femininity and bring a man to his knees! …or her knees cuz… she could fall pretty easily…because these dresses weren’t easy to walk in. In fact, while wearing this amazing piece of apparel one does not simply walk but “wiggle”. 

So the iconic wiggle dress, ya know the one that Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield and well all of the bombshells wore back in the day? That’s the one! You ever wonder wear this look came from? 

The classic wiggle dress came out and was all the rage in the fabulous 1950s and stuck around right through the swinging sixties and variations of it have been with us ever since. I mean if it ain’t broke, right? 

So how did this curve hugging, formFitting, right and tight littleNumber emerge from a proverbial sea of shirt waist dresses and full skirts? Two words: Christian Dior.  I mean, it’s the 1950s so of course it’s Dior! 

The first iteration of wiggle dress debuted in the Dior 1954 “H-Line”collection. This collection was called “H” because the silhouette resembled that of a capital letter “h” with the outer lines being perpendicular to the floor and the middle line giving just a slight emphasis on the waist that actually draws the eye to the hip which was a new way to accentuate the ideal Hourglass figure AND was in stark contrast to his previous “new look collection where attention was focused on a wasp like waist with a fuller skirt that hung away from the hip and legs. What I found really interesting is that at the time the wiggle dress shot to fame, his post war, “new look” was still going strong and still mega-popular which was a rare thing back then as prior to this popular silhouettes usually followed one path or another and two options this different were rarely popular at the same time. 

So the 1954 H-Line dresses which we now call Sheath dress have that classic straight fit  that elongates the lines of the body and accentuates the curves. The waist and hem are about the same width reinforcing that straight line symmetry. Then the following year in 1955, Dior kicked it up a notch and debuted his new Y-Line collection which basically took the H-Line dress and brought in the hem of the skirt so it was now narrower than the waist and hip and added structural volume to the top of the dress transforming that capitalH shape into that of a capital Y silhouette and this is when the wiggle really took off! 

Soon after this, other designers and manufacturers started designing their own versions of this silhouette and as happened with most popular trends the recipe gets continually tweaked until extreme versions of the original start popping up! So you may be wondering, Delia! If dior called it the H and the Y and we call it a sheath then where did the “wiggle” name come from.  Well, as time went on and more of these dresses were produced the hem circumference of the dresses started trending smaller and smaller until they were so narrow that they sort of impeded the natural length of a woman’s stride so to safely walk in a one of these dresses women took shorter and thus more frequent steps in their pumps to go the same distance resulting in a sort of shuffle that caused the hip and bottom to wiggle back and forth as she walked, so therefore ya get… the wiggle dress. Which we now call pencil skirt or pencil dress. 

Now while Dior is credited with this svelte sexy little Number, he was not the originator or narrowing a hemline!

Nope, that honor goes to another French designer that was designing about 50 years before Dior named Paul Pioret and it was Paul who gave the fashion world the infamous “hobble skirt” dress of 1908 which he claimed “freed the bust and shackled the legs” gee, thanks Paul. in fairness the hobble would be like the grandmother of the wiggle. 

So where did Poiret get his inspiration? Well, the (historically-unverified but popularly accepted) story goes that earlier in that same year the Wright Brothers (ya know the airplane guys?) well they were over in France giving flight demos and ms Edith Ogilby Berg who happened to be living in France at the time asked for a ride in the airplane and they were like sure come on! And once she went up and landed safely back on the ground two things happened: 1.  She became the first American women to fly on an airplane and 2. She inspired an observant Poiret because as she exited the flying contraption he noticed that she had tied a length of rope around the ankles of her long skirts to avoid having them fly up during flight.  

The hobble skirt became one of the most popular trends in the Edwardian era! But it also quickly became the most ridiculed. As with any fashion that impedes natural movement people made fun of it and the women who wore them which were wealthy women as working class women couldn’t possibly accomplish their labors in such a restrictive garments. Many satirical comics and pamphlets were circulated to give a laugh but even like popular trends today,Women went right along wearing them, until another trend came along. 

But the wiggle dress 50 Years later was different. It’s stuck around. Maybe in a less constrictive way, but the silhouette can still be seen today in the modern pencil skirt and sheath dress and these looks gave birth to the body con dress that came about in the 80s and is likely never going away. 

So as we welcome in the new year, let’s raise a glass to the wiggle! A dress that is flattering on most figures,  That celebrates a woman’s curves and has endured for more than nearly 70 years!