life:

In March 1948, LIFE introduced its readers to a pioneering French fashion designer and what the magazine called his “revolutionary”vision. The monsieur in question was none other than (in writer Jeanne Perkins marvelous characterization) “a timid, middle-aged, insignificant-looking little Frenchman named Christian Dior,” and the fashion earthquake he unleashed was, LIFE informed America, something called, simply and unforgettably, the “New Look.”

Here, in a tribute to the recently departed Fashion Week 2012, LIFE.com offers not only a glimpse back at a seminal moment in fashion history, but presents pictures (some that appeared in the magazine, many that have never been published before) by some of LIFE’s finest photographers, taken at a Dior show in Paris in 1948, when the New Look was all the rage and a timid, middle-aged, insignificant-looking little Frenchman astonished and thrilled the couture world.

(see more — Christian Dior: LIFE Covers the Birth of the ‘New Look’)