"WE just want to see what Madonna's wearing," said two women at the Dublin premiere of Evita last month. There are probably other reasons for going to the film but many people will echo these sentiments, thereby no doubt making the spirit of the late Eva Peron extremely happy. Should the predictions of some fashion observers - who believe an Evita revival look will have popular appeal in 1997 - be realised, the woman who inspired the film will once more achieve cult status.
Because if there is one feature which defines Madonna in this role, it is the period clothing she wears: nipped waist suits with sloping shoulders and skirts to just below the knee, voluminous satin evening dresses and full length fur coats and stoles. In the last years of her life, such items became the style trademarks of Eva Peron, like an earlier incarnation of Imelda Marcos in her obsessive preoccupation with personal appearance.
The transformation of Evita from over dressed starlet to impeccably groomed fashion icon was a gradual process. Before her marriage to Juan Peron, she tended to heap herself with as much clothing and jewellery as possible, along with a great deal of makeup. The last of these began to disappear soon after Peron became president of Argentina: his wife's Jesuit confessor, it seems, disapproved of make up and thereafter for the rest of her life she wore nothing on her face but a touch of lip stick. Her hair, which had begun almost black and allowed to hang with seductive curls down to her shoulders, was dyed steadily more blonde and always worn during the final years in a tight and severe chignon.
The heavy jewellery she had once favoured was discarded for a few - extremely valuable - pieces, most notably strings of severe pearls. Despite the excessive heat she never abandoned her addiction to fur, happily wearing enveloping coats even in mid summer. In part, this was because she believed that the people of Argentina wanted to see her as the incarnation and, realisation of their own aspirations.
"The poor like to see me be beautiful," she told the Spanish dictator Franco, who was shocked by her lavish wardrobe. "They do not want to be protected by a poorly dressed woman. You see, they dream about me. How can I let them down?"
The same discipline brought to her hair and make up was also applied to clothes. Here the key moment was Eva Peron's visit to Europe in 1947. Between her arrival in Madrid and her departure from France a few months later, a rapid learning process occurred. Critically, her time in Paris coincided with the debut of the new fashion house of Christian Dior, coincidentally celebrating its 50th anniversary this year. Evita visited Dior and left her measurements with him until her death in 1952, she was one of his most loyal and important clients, having pieces from his collections flown to Buenos Aires for important state occasions.
Dior's struggle to succeed was almost as arduous and long as that of Eva Peron. Born into a wealthy industrialist family in 1905, he had run an art gallery in Paris during the 1920s until his father was bankrupted following the Wall Street Crash. Thereafter Dior had a number of different careers - at one stage during the second World War he worked as a market gardener - until being employed by the couture house of Lucien Lelong. The opportunity to set up his own business came in 1946 when he met Marcel Boussac, a cotton magnate who was willing to back a designer using his fabrics. Boussac set up the almost entirely unknown Christian Dior with 10 million francs and the first collection was shown in February 1947.
THIS was the post war New Look as it was christened by Carmel Snow, influential editor of Harper's Bazaar indisputably the greatest fashion sensation this century. The defining characteristics of the New Look were essentially anachronistic, barking back to the last century in the sloping shoulder lines of a Dior jacket, the waist of which was drawn in tightly thanks to severe boned corsetry beneath. Over exaggerated hips (courtesy of padding around the waistband), layered skirts fell almost to the ankles in folds not seen since the Empress Eugenie had held court in Paris.
At the height of restrictions on clothing expenditure throughout Europe, Dior produced dresses which cost a minimum of £250 each and used more than 25 metres of fabric in the skirt alone. The prevailing style of the time was for women to dress in sober and tight fitting suits of a vaguely military cut.
Christian Dior, to the delight of a handful of women with unlimited budgets such as Eva Peron, offered a reaction against austerity with clothes which quite clearly defied all financial restrictions. Although there were attempts made to resist the allure of the New Loo in the US, the Georgia State legislature announced its intention to introduce a ban on long skirts and in Britain, one woman MP announced in Parliament that "The New Look is reminiscent of a caged bird's attitude" - the Dior revolution was unstoppable.
Almost more than anyone else, Eva Peron became personally identified with the New Look; curiously, a couple of years after her death, Dior - who himself died suddenly in 1957 - abandoned this style and reverted to post war sobriety. On the 50th anniversary of his house's creation and with the release of Evita, could the New Look become new again? It seems an unlikely scenario, not least because just a year ago, thanks to the appearance of a couple of films, very similar talk was being made of a Jane Austen inspired fashion revival. This never took place; nor, most likely, will Dior's moment return.
Four seasons ago, British designer John Galliano - ironically now just named as head of Dior - produced his own variation of the New Look, which owed something both to Christian Dior and also to one of his great rivals at the time, Jacques Fath. Galliano's waisted jackets with hip pads and below the knee skirts enjoyed a certain success among his admirers but did not inspire any imitation among other designers. For practical reasons, the Dior look of the late 1940s is simply not very attractive to women today who will not want to wear voluminous skirts and restrictive undergarments. The predominant trend during the 1990s has been towards pared back simplicity and the New Look in its extravagant use of fabric and uncomfortably moulded silhouette has little place in today's world.
Even at the time, it was understood that his designs, while exquisite to look at, were not necessarily easy to wear. Dior was a last beautiful flourish of an outmoded regime - Chanel, who was his antithesis, accused the designer of making women "look like armchairs. He puts covers on them."
The chances of Evita encouraging a revival of 1940s fashion look slimmer than even one of today's favourite slip dresses.