The New Look was an argument about cloth
Christian Dior showed his first collection on 12 February 1947. The press called it the New Look and wrote about the hemline. The part worth looking at is underneath.
The Bar jacket is built before it is draped. A boned waist tape, hip padding, horsehair interlining at the peplum: the shape belongs to the corsetière, not the cutter. The skirt takes twelve to twenty metres of cloth depending on whether you count the underskirt. Britain was still rationing clothes in 1947 and did not stop until 1949. France had come out of occupation three years earlier.
That is why women in Paris pulled the dresses off models in the street, and why a British MP called it irresponsible. The objection was not to the shape. It was to the yardage.