High Fashion: The Women's Undergarment Industry and the Foundations of American Spaceflight

Abstract

In the years that followed the end of World War II, Americans turned to synthetic fibers to transform their bodies to meet the challenges of a new era: for women, the pinched waists and thrusting bustlines of Christian Dior's “New Look;” for men, the physiological demands of high-speed, high-altitude flight. The story of foundation garments and pressure suits is not simply one of government-developed “spin-off” technologies invigorating the civilian market; rather, new techniques for the manufacture of civilian apparel infused pressure suit development. Inspired by each other, the two industries revolutionized “high fashion” with a series of radical new garments as “dangerous” as they were beautiful. Considering the two as complementary technologies may illuminate both the ways in which the consumer market enriched American innovation during the twentieth century, and the resonances these two kinds of garments have as iconic representations of postwar American modernity, beauty, and power.