On February 12, 1947, Christian Dior unveiled his debut collection at his salon on Avenue Montaigne in Paris, presenting what the press immediately dubbed the 'New Look': nipped waists, padded hips, and long, full skirts that explicitly revived the pre-war hourglass silhouette and, with it, the boned corset-like 'waspie' foundation garment. The collection was simultaneously celebrated as a return to feminine elegance and condemned by feminist critics and women who had enjoyed wartime freedom of dress as a retrograde step. The controversy raged across Europe and North America throughout 1947.

The New Look provoked a fierce literary and cultural response from women writers who experienced it as an attempt to force women back into pre-war domestic and bodily confinement following their wartime freedoms. Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex (1949) drew on this moment of enforced return to feminine restriction in its arguments about the social construction of femininity. Poet Stevie Smith, writing from suburban London, engaged satirically with the returning pressures of feminine appearance in her verse of this period.