Hemlines have been equated with both fashion and culture, defining particular decades, generations, economies, media, and gendered ideologies, thereby working as imagistic markers within systems of popular culture. Couture culture's system of design traditionally has fed the contents of fashion magazines with fantasy imagery fabricating a "look," color, or hemline for readers. Such is the case with Christian Dior's New Look of 1947, the essential feature of which was the full skirt fish-tailing from cinched waist to mid-calf. This shape and length were adapted for department-store and catalogue sales and for home-sewing patterns, thus becoming part of popular fashion.

Hollywood's studio system of the 1930s and 1940s established a primary place for designers, whose costumes glamorized the female star, made her a screen icon, and typified the genre character she played, especially in melodrama and film noir. Two films released in 1957, Designing Woman (Minnelli) and Funny Face (Donen), parodied...