Dior Magazine Holder

When Christian Dior launched his couture house, in 1946, he wanted nothing less than to make “an elegant woman more beautiful and a beautiful woman more elegant.” He succeeded, and in doing so the visionary designer altered the landscape of 20th century fashion. Vintage Dior bags, shoes, evening dresses, shirts and other garments and accessories are known today for their feminine and sophisticated sensibility.

Dior was born in Granville, on the Normandy coast, in 1905. His prosperous haute bourgeois parents wanted him to become a diplomat despite his interest in art and architecture. However, they agreed to bankroll an art gallery, which Dior opened in 1928 in Paris with a friend.

This was the start of Dior’s rise in the city’s creative milieu, where he befriended Pablo Picasso and Jean Cocteau. After seven years as an art dealer, Dior retrained as a fashion illustrator, eventually landing a job as a fashion designer for Robert Piguet, and in 1941, following a year of military service, he joined the house of Lucien Lelong. Just five years later, with the backing of industrialist Marcel Boussac, the ascendant Dior established his own fashion house, at 30 avenue Montaigne in Paris.

Just two years after the end of World War II, the fashion crowd and the moribund haute couture industry were yearning, comme tout Paris, for security and prosperity, desperate to discard the drab, sexless, utilitarian garb imposed by wartime deprivation. They needed to dream anew.

And Dior delivered: He designed a collection for a bright, optimistic future. “It’s quite a revolution, dear Christian!” exclaimed Carmel Snow, the prescient American editor-in-chief of Harper’s Bazaar, famously proclaiming, “Your dresses have such a new look.” The press ran with the description, christening Dior’s debut Spring/Summer haute couture collection the New Look. “God help those who bought before they saw Dior,” said Snow. “This changes everything.”

Dior’s collection definitively declared that opulence, luxury and femininity were in. His skirts could have 40-meter-circumference hems, and outfits could weigh up to 60 pounds. They were cut and shaped like architecture, on strong foundations that molded women and “freed them from nature,” Dior said. Rather than rationing, his ladies wanted reams of fabric and 19-inch waists enforced by wire corsets, and the fashion world concurred. The debut got a standing ovation.

In the subsequent decade, Paris ruled as the undisputed fashion capital of the world, and Christian Dior reigned as its king. With the luxuriously full skirts of his New Look, suits and his drop-dead gorgeous couture dresses and ball gowns worthy of any princess, Dior gave women the gift of glamour they’d lost in the miserable years of war.

On 1stDibs, find an exquisite range of vintage Christian Dior clothing, jewelry, handbags and other items.

Antique and vintage magazine racks and stands provide an easy organization option for storing your favorite periodicals without tucking them away out of sight.

The first magazine in America was published in the 1700s. Newspapers, however, are much older. As the popularity of magazines and newspapers grew, so did the need to store and organize them.

In your living room, a well-designed vintage magazine rack will help display your magazines in an orderly fashion while maintaining the stylistic integrity of your space. This accessory will keep clutter to a minimum, and, best of all, it encourages visitors to read at their leisure. Adding a rack or stand to your home office or reading nook is going to help you keep your desk and coffee table tidy. And given that so many have been made over the years, the right magazine rack to work cohesively in your space no matter your furniture style shouldn’t be hard to find.

Wood magazine racks, no matter the era of origin, are going to bring warmth to your entertainment room and will sit snugly alongside your organic modern furnishings. Mid-century modern magazine racks are also versatile in that regard, with furniture designers at the time working in teak (a preferred material for makers of the period), bamboo and rattan and exploring different forms and provocative embellishments. Alternatively, a streamlined metal magazine rack might be a better fit, texture-wise, if you’re looking for clean lines and an overall polished style to complement a minimalist approach.

Browse the selection of antique and vintage magazine racks and stands on 1stDibs to find the perfect accent piece for any space.