For the ladies, accentuating femininity was the goal. The flapper’s straight, dropped-waist dress of the 1920s—a garment so loose that it could be pulled on over the head—was gone. Dresses were fashioned from clingy materials and cut on the bias, diagonally across the grain of the cloth; the technique exploited the stretch of the fabric to emphasize the curves of the body. New methods of weaving produced fabrics ideal for sinuous designs: mousselines and supple velvets, silk gauzes and chiffons. Every year, more body was exposed. At the beach and by the pool, women could dare to show off in midriff-revealing two-piece swimsuits. Evening gowns dipped down backs, displaying naked flesh. Nightgowns were slinky and slippery. It could be hard to distinguish between what 1930s women wore to galas and what they wore to bed at night.

Hollywood hyped the new look, broadcasting it to the tens of millions of people who flocked to American cinemas every week during the movie-mad Depression. But the innovation in women’s fashion was chiefly Parisian. The new silhouettes of the 1930s were the product of a couturier world unlike any before or since. More than half of the leading Paris couture houses were headed by women—including the luminaries Coco Chanel and Madeleine Vionnet, as well as now-obscure designers such as Louise Boulanger and Augusta Bernard. Like Vionnet, who had toiled as a seamstress from the age of 11, these women were not born to the elite. Tremendous talent and perseverance propelled them to the top.

Vionnet occupied the pinnacle, and with her contemporaries, she outfitted a revolution. Her liquid draping, on display in the deceptively simple, lithe cut of a 1938 gold lamé halter-top gown, lapped the contours of the figure. But her aims went beyond beauty. Vionnet, who called herself an “enemy of fashion,” embraced women’s liberation and social reform. She sought to improve working conditions in her atelier, providing her employees with free medical and dental care, maternity leave and babysitting services, and paid holidays, too.

This was the Parisian world that the Anglo-American designer Charles James entered in his mid-20s. Working in Vionnet’s wake, he learned to design by draping fabric directly on the body; his technique was fundamental to the sculptural approach for which he later became famous. In the 1930s, James debuted a dress that took the body-hugging style to extremes. His spiral design—a progenitor of the wrap dress—wound around the body and was secured at the hip with three clasps. James left none of the erotics of fashion to the imagination: he branded his formfitting creation the “Taxi dress,” as in a garment that could be put on (and taken off) in a cab.

The streamlined style of the 1930s was, well, tailor-made for a self-conscious era. This was elegance for people who didn’t want to stand out: inconspicuous consumption for the rich few and inexpensive good taste for the newly hard-pressed middle class, desperate to keep up appearances. Between 1929 and 1932, the American economy had nearly ground to a halt by every measure: income, employment, manufacturing output, and retail sales. When the sociologists Robert and Helen Lynd returned in the mid-1930s to Muncie, Indiana, the site they called Middletown in their classic study of American small-city life during the prosperous 1920s, they noted the circumspect mood of the times. People who still owned diamonds had stashed them in safe-deposit boxes. “They don’t have the face to wear them nowadays,” one man told the Lynds. Affluent Middletowners favored “less pretentiousness in dress.”