Dior (Q575)
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French multinational luxury fashion house
- Dior
- House of Dior
- Christian Dior S.A.
- Christian Dior
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Dior |
French multinational luxury fashion house |
|
Statements
1996
artistic director
2016
female creative director
1957
tailleur
2009
2014
creative director for fashion jewellery and creative consultant for leather goods
intern
2022
guest designer
unknown
assistant
collaborator
1997
footwear designer
designer
shoe designer
designer
1947
1957
The Italian artist and competitive archer Sagg Napoli shot arrows at a target as the models did their circuit at Christian Dior today. Glass partitions separated her from the audience for safety, but they didn’t lessen the fierceness of her performance. Napoli, whose real name is Sofia Ginevra Gianni, wore a one-shoulder bodysuit and car wash miniskirt from Maria Grazia Chiuri’s new collection and her muscles contracted and released with each release of her bow. There’s never been anything like her on a Paris runway before.Since her arrival at Dior in 2016, Chiuri has referenced a long list of strong women, but Napoli is the first whose power manifested in such a physical way. She was a sort of contemporary avatar for the women warriors of ancient mythology that Chiuri said she took as muses this season. From Diana the Huntress to Wonder Woman to Napoli—that’s the through line.Representations of all of them were pinned to Chiuri’s mood board in the Dior studio, along with an autumn 1951 look, with suggestions of formal riding attire, that Christian Dior dubbed the Amazone. Chiuri was making links between ancient Greece’s peplos, a simple draped garment she’s often referenced, and the house founder’s rigorous tailoring. The connective tissue was the slicing diagonal lines suggestive of movement and agility, qualities that have not often been connected with the idea of womanhood and femininity.In some ways, this was a return to Chiuri’s debut for spring 2017, which used the language of sport to convey its sense of freedom and set the groundwork for her feminist project. Here, archery replaced fencing, but the athleticism of the clothes seemed mostly influenced by the street and the way modern women wear their exercise gear out of the gym and in the other parts of their lives, in part because nothing else is as comfortable. Here, bodysuits were styled under semi-transparent dresses, blazers were paired with mesh track pants, and jackets were crisscrossed with parachute straps. For shoes, many of the models wore knee-high gladiator boots.Accenting the collection’s more traditional ready-to-wear was a circa 1970-’71 graphic Dior logo. With its exaggerated vertical lines, somehow evocative of a movie title sequence, it conveyed aerodynamism and speed. The same goes for the jackets and shirts that were cut to fall off of one shoulder, with the added element of sexual allure.
Some of these shoulder-exposing jackets and shirts were accessorized with gauntlet gloves that inched past the elbows to almost the shoulders, a look lifted—believe it or not—from a 1949 Dior show.“Myths tell us you have to renounce your femininity to be strong and to be right,” Chiuri said at a preview, “but Sagg says no, you don’t have to renounce your femininity to be strong.” Chiuri’s collection successfully inverted that idea: You don’t have to renounce your strength to be feminine.
24 September 2024
Couture has historically been about “building the body” with its corset foundations and highly structured silhouettes. “But I don’t want to build the body, I want to release it,” Maria Grazia Chiuri said today. That’s as clear a manifesto for Chiuri’s work at Christian Dior as she’s ever uttered, and the reason she is the most modern couturier working today.On the eve of the Paris Olympics, her idea was to recast sportswear through a couture lens. Her very first collection at Dior was dedicated to fencing. Here, she married Ancient Greece, the birthplace of the Olympics, with the 1924 Games, when women were fighting to be taken seriously as athletes and also, thanks to the Industrial Revolution and the invention of jersey fabric, adopting new forms of dress better adapted to the movements required for sports. She called out Alice Milliat, a rower whose tireless advocacy helped get women’s track and field competitions into the 1928 Olympics.We take for granted now the comfort of jog bras and leggings, but 100 years ago we were still wearing corsets to ride bikes. It’s puzzling that corsets and constraint are still such common sights in the highest echelons of clothes making. In this regard, at least, couture earns its long held reputation as the old-world, even dusty, part of the fashion business. But not Chiuri’s Dior.She returned to the peplos, a traditional draped garment Dior himself cut in chiffon; Chiuri pointed to a ravishing photograph of just such a dress from 1948. Hers were constructed in silk jersey or metal jersey, and instead of anchoring them to a corset, she used embroidered tank tops and bodysuits that utterly changed the attitude. Though they remained formal, they looked free, a quality enhanced by the models’ strappy skimmer sandals. Maybe you couldn’t wear them for the high jump—one of the track and field competitions added in 1928—but I bet you could throw the javelin, a sport that was only added to official competition later.“Couture gives me the opportunity to move these references, our heritage, into new territory,” Chiuri said. “Wellness, comfort, and beauty—I think these three elements are very important in our work. But sometimes fashion is more obsessed with the silhouette or the construction than the material. I want to do clothes where the body stays well, and can move freely.
”Pantsuits in white moiré and black velvet with a peplos suspended from the waistband of the trousers caught some of that relaxed but still polished vibe, as did a day dress in black silk cady with a hand-scalloped bib. But the evening dresses were the thing here. An asymmetrical dress in gold lamé pleated by hand and suspended from a leather strap gets the collection’s gold medal.
24 June 2024
What strange emotions the skirl of the bagpipes can evoke. (Skirl, for the non-Scots among us, is that haunting/headache-inducing wail that they make.) With their ever so mournful and wistful lamenting sound, bagpipes are like the Bjork of the musical instrument world: otherworldly and totally opinion dividing. Maria Grazia Chiuri opened and closed her Dior resort show, held in the ordered and verdant splendor of the gardens of Drummond Castle in Scotland, with the pipes. And this Scot, who never gets misty eyed at the slightest strain of them, found himself surprisingly and rather deeply moved. (But I’m not so equivocal about Bjork:Love, love, loveher.)It’s likely that wasn’t the only emotion that was evoked by Chiuri’s exceptional collection, which intertwined the history of the house of Dior with the romantic, dramatic, and sometimes frankly bloody history of Scotland to terrific effect. Desire is the emotion I’m thinking of here, because this was one of those Chiuri outings suffused with what she does best: clothes which are defined by a deep rooted sense of realism but which also simultaneously transcend it. (Total side note here, but her resort shows also allow for a little empirical research on how women actually look in her clothing, the real litmus test of a brand, and the Chiuri-ites looked so right—as in grown-up and effortless and cool—in their hourglass jackets, and full skirts, and clumpy boots or beribboned slingbacks, regardless of age, or physique, or for that matter, attitude.)Chiuri set herself to work with everything sartorially associated with the country. “Scotland is an important reference in the fashion world,” she said at a preview the day before the show, “and I wanted to interpret it in a different way. For my generation, it’s so associated with punk, but there is another way to go into it, and that’s through the textiles. In fashion we concentrate so much on shape: But textiles are a big part of our job—what you can do with them, and the changes you can make through them.” So, Chiuri went to the traditional—the tartan and cashmeres, the tweeds and the Argyles—and deftly filtered them into a collection which variously drew on the geopolitics of fabrics, Mary Stuart (aka Mary Queen of Scots) and the way she gave political commentary through her embroideries, and yes, of course,vive le punk, so that it rocked with a defiant beauty—and an equally defiant energy. It felt uncompromising.
But then maybe women can’t afford to be anything but that, especially now.
3 June 2024
The Apple TV+ showThe New Lookclimaxes with Christian Dior’s Paris haute couture debut in 1947. A collection of voluptuous curves and prodigious use of material, it rocked the fashion world, setting trends that would last a decade and sparking actualfights in the streets. As radical as the new silhouette was in post-war Europe, it was equaled by Dior’s next move: the establishment of a New York atelier that would make more practical, everyday versions of his made-to-measure creations for modern American lifestyles, in the vein of women designers who were building brands of their own in the States, like Claire McCardell and Elizabeth Hawes. A worthy storyline for season two, maybe.Maria Grazia Chiuri, the creative director of Dior since 2016, has her own New York story. In aninterviewlast week, she toldVogue’s Jose Criales-Unzueta about her first trip to the city, back “when you could still smoke on airplanes. “I’ve desired from the moment I arrived at Dior eight years ago to come here and realize this show,” she said. Tonight, she made it happen at the Brooklyn Museum, which played host to the decade- and designer-spanning retrospective,“Christian Dior: Designer of Dreams,”back in 2021.Pre-show, in a makeshift space carved out of the museum’s gift store, she added, “New York has been a big influence on my personal style. I like sportswear, and I like denim too. I don’t think about a collection for specific moments. I think more about wardrobes, where you can mix each piece in a different way, and also what is adaptable. I’m obsessed with that because I think it’s very functional.”Her comments track with thefall collectionshe showed in February, where her reference was the 1967 opening of the Miss Dior boutique and the launch of a Paris-made ready-to-wear collection designed by one of her predecessors, Marc Bohan. Here, the fall show’s A-line minidresses were replaced by the nipped waist silhouettes of two decades earlier. Several of the jackets were informed by designs Marlene Dietrich commissioned from Dior, and one model sported the top hat, white waistcoat, and black tails the actress wore in the famous nightclub scene fromMorocco.
As is Chiuri’s style, there were plenty of other references besides, including simply constructed and ornately beaded slip dresses of the kind she remembers from her early visit to New York—she likes a mannish top coat as an accompaniment, or a chunky handknit sweater—and new versions of the now iconic saddlebag launched in 1999 at the height of John Galliano’s Dior tenure featuring the date of tonight’s show, a collector’s item in the making.A stars-and-stripes sweatshirt worn with logo track pants punctuated the lineup, but better were the more subtle Americanisms, like the leather aviator jacket and tweed skirt that looked like a nod in Amelia Earhart’s direction, and a belted cotton shirtdress that would’ve delighted Elizabeth Hawes. Truest to the promise of unrestricted movement and ease associated with American sportswear was a little black dress with a shaped waist made from silk knit that was 100% corset-less. “I like this idea that you can rework a shape of Dior with a different technique,” Chiuri said. “It gives immediately a different attitude.”This slideshow has beenedited.
16 April 2024
You couldn’t mistake the fact that Maria Grazia Chiuri was taking Miss Dior as her theme. The words were splashed large in hand-written graphics across her fall collection—but what read (deceptively) like graffiti turned out not to be that at all. As she explained in a preview, it was a blow-up of a Christian Dior archival logo, a piece of hand-drawn advertising artwork made for the launch of the now forgotten Miss Dior boutique in 1967.It was the first time the haute couture house had branched out into making a separate ready-to-wear collection, a then-revolutionary innovation during the tenure of Marc Bohan. “I’m very fascinated by this collection, and this moment of Mr. Bohan’s history,” said Chiuri. “I think he was really visionary for the time because the couture house was in difficulty. They had this relationship only with these couture clients—and women were changing. Not all the couture-house creative directors were so visionary to understand the new era, and new women.”You could see how Chiuri related to the Miss Dior touch-points. Pinned to her board in the Dior studio were visuals of Bohan surrounded by models in late-1960s A-line minis and maxi-dresses, as well as the work of the ultra-glamorous Gabriella Crespi, the Italian avant-garde furniture and interior designer Bohan commissioned for the store. Chiuri pointed out how very different the A-line silhouettes were from the original waisted Christian Dior New Look. There was a good reason for that, she said, since the corseted and padded understructures made to fit individual couture clients couldn’t be reproduced in factories.And besides, that angular ‘Mod’ look was the way pop style had gone, in a seismic time for the democratization of fashion, famously driven by youth movements and the beginnings of Women’s Lib (as feminism was then labelled.) In a way, Chiuri’s work at Dior ready-to-wear has been about liberating women—and herself, as a designer—from the tight-waisted Bar-jacket all over again. In this collection, all the jackets and outerwear were in non-nipped shapes, the trousers slouchy, the low block-heeled boots and shoes designed for easy walking.Notes of the ’60s-lite reverberated through the styling—double-face cashmere miniskirt sets with matching sleeveless tops, black turtlenecks, swinging gold pendant necklaces—and occasional bursts of Gainsbourg and Birkin’s “Je T’aime... Moi Non Plus” on the soundtrack. (That sexual-revolution pop landmark dates from 1967, too.
) Studying the Miss Dior period, Chiuri said she’d noticed how Bohan was the first to start applying printed logos on headscarves, and how shoes, stockings, socks, lingerie and bags were wildly popular as brand extensions.As in ’67, so in ’24. Chiuri’s patent ankle-strap pumps, block-heeled Mary Janes and modernized ’60s black multi-buckled ‘wet-look’ kneeboots are catnip, cleverly accessorized here and there with gold Miss Dior logo-buckles on the toes. When some of the models turned around, black stocking seams were seen to be embroidered with Miss Dior, in hand-written script.It’s her ability to design a cleverly-merchandized, full-spectrum wardrobe and slews of playful-branded accessories that’s made Chiuri’s Dior such a popular hit in stores.
27 February 2024
Maria Grazia Chuiri struck a perfect-pitch in her Dior haute couture collection. It had simplicity and it had opulence; an unforced sense of history, and a tuned-in sense of modern relevance.At a time when there’s so much talk about ‘quiet luxury’—too frequently a synonym for ‘boring’—Chuiri’s take was all the more outstanding. She describe it, simply, as “a conversation between two fabrics that are apparently in contradiction.” An exploration of plain cotton, on the one hand, and of the sober but incredibly gorgeous properties of moire fabric on the other, most of it filtered through a deft reinterpretation of Christian Dior’s 1950s silhouettes.“It’s the first time I’ve used moire—I always associate it more with interior design,” she said at a preview in the Dior showroom. “But I discovered it has an incredible palette of colors, and the pattern of it, where it catches the light, gives a different perspective on embroidery.” A strapless moire evening dress was standing before her. It was the color of dark poppies, an intense carnation red, something like the stately color used by cardinals and popes. It had couture folds in the skirt, and an architectural cut at the hips, contradictorily simple and splendid at the same time.Chiuri had come across a dove-gray moire dress named Cigalle, in Christian Dior’s ‘Profile’ collection of 1953. It had a geometric, jutting-hip cut that fascinated her as much as the fabric. “It refers to 18th century court dress, but it’s also ergonomic, like the cars and planes of his time, that he was interested in.” She took the cut forward and spun it away from heavy corseting to make it wearable for today.Starting the show, there was her other idea: plain, restrained beige cotton, which began with trench-coat-like hybrids but soon began to take shape as ’50s-influenced dresses with small waists and draped bodices.It stepped up when she introduced the moire, extending it through many iterations in pale gold, rich burgundy, deep blue, and black. Once, it was a Watteau-back coat dress, at other times evening trouser suits; yet again in a full-skirted gown. The thing is, no embellishment is necessary on top of moire—the irregular zig-zagging weave does the talking. It seems unfussy and yet, in all of these very different instances, it has presence: the sort of impact that will stand out on a red carpet; restrained yet outrageously glamorous and cool.
It’s easy to imagine the immediate clamor for these dresses and suits for the awards season—and how moire will soon trickle out from this show as a fashion-wide influence.Chiuri had more options, from pretty flower-strewn embroidered spring dresses to plissé silk columns as simple as t-shirts to graceful capes. Really, she has it covered for women of all ages and shapes when it comes to the tricky challenges of dressing up—if they have the money, of course. That’s the insight that’s making the house of Christian Dior such a success.
22 January 2024
Fashion and feminism, the past and the present: Maria Grazia Chiuri’s mission—as we’ve seen from the get-go—is infusing contemporary relevance into Christian Dior’s wardrobe. She’s been saying this since the very beginning of her tenure. Scroll back on Vogue Runway to the quote she gave at her first show on Setpember 30, 2016: “The message, really, is that there is not one type of woman.”She’s persisted in pursuing that anti-stereotyping principle even more strongly. In this collection there were multiple threads and subtexts both woven together and physically unraveling in the clothes, and a blindingly obvious feminist art statement on the walls. In a post-Barbie world, the irony of the neon pink and yellow highlighting and rebutting sexist advertising (by the Italian artist Elena Bellantoni) wouldn’t be lost on a young audience. Nor would the contrasting darkness—a bit furious, a chic variety of Parisian neo-grunge, really—that came out on the runway.Photos of women rebels and powerful outsiders crowded Chiuri’s mood board: Ingrid Bergman as Joan of Arc, Maria Callas as Medea, Simone Signoret appearing in a film adaptation of Arthur Miller’sThe Crucible(about the Salem witch trials). There was something a bit witchy in the wispy, cobwebby knitted lace dresses and, if you knew the references, something singed about the edges of the denim, plus apparently flame-marked boots.“But really, I want to break this thing that collections have to be about one reference,” said Chiuri with a sigh during in a preview. In fact, her subject is a complex response to what’s going on today, and how fashion can adequately meet it. She said she recognized some parallels between Bellantoni’s subversion of the alienating language of advertising and her own desire to make Dior’s high fashion relatable. “I think that in fashion we also we have this risk—that we give references that people think they can’t attain personally. So I really want to create a wardrobe where there is just a little bit of evidence that you can personalize your style.”The lodestar of the many successors who have worked for Dior—and perhaps the bane of their lives—is the Bar jacket, and the corseted constructs of the ’50s haute couture with which Christian Dior changed fashion. But Chiuri has found her peace with it. One thing that started her off this season was the asymmetrical, off-one-shoulder neckline swoop of a black 1948 dress named Abandon.
It cued her work on white one-sleeve shirts, shirts styled under pinafore dresses, and suchlike. Where a Bar jacket appeared this season, it was eased at the waist, and frayed at the hem. The conventionality of the pleated New Look circle skirt was disrupted with leg-flashing slits and blurry black, white, and grayish prints.Still, Chiuri’s deeper connection with Dior, the man, is much more on the level of his psychological motivations and responses to the times he was living in. His escape into tarot readings with a Madame Delahaye (who became all the rage among fashion editors) is something Chiuri can relate to. “In hard times, war, you look outside yourself for hope,” she commented. More than that, in his era Christian Dior was responsible for raising the morale of women in a very hard time.Chiuri is becoming more conscious of wanting to serve today’s women in that way with every season. After all, she saw it coming. Perhaps at the beginning her “We should all be feminists” T-shirts (quoting Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie) might have seemed like a statement of the very obvious. But as time has passed—only seven, short, horrific years—women’s rights and freedoms have being significantly rolled back, or have been violently under attack, all over the world.Fashion is only fashion, but at its best, its commentary on the times is worth recording.
26 September 2023
The 66-strong procession of modern goddesses—each clad in her own floor-length silhouette—created a visually calming atmosphere on the Christian Dior runway. For Maria Grazia Chiuri, it brought together the powerful simplicity of Greek and Roman antiquity—the ancient culture she was brought up amongst in Rome—with her thoughts on how ‘classicism’ can be made eternally relevant through Dior’s haute couture.On the one hand there was pristine minimalism—monumental, sculpted capes; dresses with vertical pleats echoing Doric columns; the clean, long lines of architectural tunics. And on the other, delicate vestal-virgin shifts, nymph-like dresses, gilded lace, lattice work embroideries and minute edgings of pearl beads.‘Classicism’ has another significance in the house of Christian Dior, of course. Chiuri’s take on the heritage of the Dior suit also played a central role. She honored it by placing jackets over matching long skirts and dresses, easing away the padding and peplums; replacing done-up formality with an ageless, concisely modern sense of chic.It’s easy to imagine how this collection—grand yet modest, modern yet elaborate, light yet substantial—will appeal to haute couture clients across every culture that Dior has a foothold in. That’s because the tireless Chiuri has done her homework. The travels across countries and continents she’s undertaken in the past few years have been quite mind-boggling. This show might have been centered in Paris, but it will have the power to speak to women the world over.
3 July 2023
On the global whirligig that is the 2024 resort season, next stop: Mexico City. We are here to see Maria Grazia Chiuri of Dior’s ode to Mexico, which is full of airy shirting casually tucked into long pleated or tiered skirts swishing the floor, traditionalhuipiltops unexpectedly and youthfully worn with denim cut with a healthy amount of slouchy attitude, and the nipped-waist, house-classic Bar jacket, only NOW faced with velvet, or scrolled with embroideries. All of this was given a little glint and gleam courtesy of gold strand necklaces or hefty silver belt buckles with butterfly motifs (the butterfly was a constant visual refrain here) and with plenty of substantial leather cowboy boots in the local vernacular, swirled with stitching and, in some cases, flecked with tiny coral beads.Mexico is a country that Chiuri has loved for many years, and one she has wanted to show in for only marginally less time. Though as is her wont with her cruise excursions, she goes into exhaustive detail researching each and every destination; this one was no exception, with her discovering that the house of Dior first visited way back in 1954. You only need to know a little about Chiuri to understand why she is so drawn to the place. There’s the country’s centuries-old belief in the power of nature. Its impressive group of uncompromising female artists who have often centered women’s voices and experiences at the heart of what they do. (Standing over this collection like guardian angels: Leonora Carrington, Tina Modotti, and of course, Frida Kahlo, whose alma mater, the Colegio de San Ildefonso, provided the show venue.) The finely wrought handwork and textiles which can be found across the country, bringing craft, heritage, and community together. And last but certainly not least, magical realism, with its potent symbolism and inexplicable otherworldliness.All of this is prime Chiuri territory, for sure, and tonight’s show—a terrific and thoughtful outing—also served as a reminder that the further she goes out into the world, the closer she comes back to herself. These cruise collections of hers—and this one was no exception—always seem to yield what feels like her most personal work. A case in point: the way she found the connection between Mexico and her native Italy (in fact, many Mediterranean countries) through the shape of the clothes that were traditionally worn.
“The shapes are very simple, they use the square, the circle, and the rectangle,” she said at a preview. “That really interested me.”
21 May 2023
At the end of a year when traveling shows and cross-cultural collaborations are the mania of the moment, it’s eye-opening to know that Christian Dior—founded by a visionary couturier with a zeal for getting on planes and boats to show his collections to the women of the world— was making publicity splashes here, there, and everywhere, decades before anyone else. In 1964, it was India.There’s a reason that Maria Grazia Chiuri wove the house archive evidence—photos of Marc Bohan arriving on an Air India flight with a troupe of Dior models for shows in Delhi and Mumbai—into the background of her new lineup. “This collection is done to celebrate my relationship with India, which has been part of the system of fashion for a long time,” she said from her office in Paris.The results, when you peer around her rather dark lookbook, combine richness and light-touch modern simplicity, and are far more about a real and lasting engagement than a one-off trip around a national theme or an excursion into history.“I work with India every day,” she explained. The familiarity and mutual creative respect began for Chiuri 30 years ago, when she started developing embroideries with Indian haute couture specialists for Valentino. As creative director at Christian Dior, she’s deepened the relationship since 2016 via a partnership with Karishma Swali, the director of the Chanakya School of Craft, which champions the inclusion of women into a highly skilled industry that has been traditionally a male-only preserve. “The school and laboratory offer salaries, health insurance, and child care opportunities for women,” she smiled. “I think it’s the most satisfying thing I do.”The cross-cultural creative interplay has yielded a collection that adapts traditional shapes and material techniques to the female fashion-think that Chiuri has brought to Dior. “I like it that every woman can transform things for herself. Every piece you can wear in a different way. You can mix daywear and evening wear.”She took “the verticality” of tunics and sari-skirts as a starting point to design long, narrow dresses, open at one side—options that can be glamorously dramatic for evening, or switched up with leggings, trousers, or shorts. There are also matching total looks in vivid shantung silk, which in fact break apart into draped skirts and cropped shirts.
31 March 2023
A direct, austere and yet powerfully sexy Parisian walked the Dior runway in Maria Grazia Chiuri’s fall ready-to-wear show. Mostly dressed in black, artfully wrinkled suits and dresses, her wardrobe adroitly addressed both the somber present and the 1950s. This was recognizably Christian Dior’s storied heritage, right enough—but “reconstructed” as Chiuri put it, by a creative director who is focused on seeing how the past can be made relevant for today’s women.What’s distinctive about the routes Chiuri takes into Dior’s history is that she identifies with the rediscovered, little-known stories of the women who wore his clothes. At a time when we might be craving more simplicity and less performative theatricality from fashion—that’s a yes to pencil midis and plain-but-interesting day dresses—her design solutions came from her personal response to thinking about the feisty resilience of three post-war clients. Present in one way or another on the runway were Catherine Dior, the couturier’s sister; Juliette Gréco, the Left Bank singer and actress who was famed for wearing existentialist black; and Edith Piaf who was, well Edith Piaf. The Dior printed T-shirt of the season read “Je ne regrette rien.”Chiuri sees all three as forerunners of feminism. “Catherine Dior had come back from a concentration camp, and became an entrepreneur who never married, though she had a long-term relationship. We forget that in the ’50s these women were more liberated than we can imagine,” Churi said during a preview. Then she added, “It was also a way to think about myself. Because in my house, my mother and grandmother were independent women who had come through the Second World War.”Chiuri’s background is another key to her sensibilities. What she brings as an Italian to a storied French house is a lightness that has managed to ease and modernize Dior templates without committing brand sacrilege by throwing them out. The rumpled surfaces of the clothes—almost as if a cache of New Look checked suits, pleated circle skirts and cocktail dresses had been found in a trunk—had a satisfyingly vintage look about them, achieved by ultra-modern fabrics being interwoven with metal thread. “With Dior silhouettes, they are very precise—with this fabric nothing is precise,” Chiuri laughed, demonstrating how the “metal memory” in the garments means that women can tweak them to suit their bodies or moods at will.
28 February 2023
Maria Grazia Chiuri came across archive pictures of Josephine Baker performing in Dior couture in New York in 1951 in New York. The shining American-born French Black star and civil rights activist came to perform in Paris in 1925, becoming a leading light of the Jazz Age cabaret and a French citizen. In World War II, she joined the French Resistance, and in 2021 was finally honored as one of the greats of the French nation when her name was inscribed at a solemn ceremony at the Pantheon in Paris.What an inspiration for the creative director to relate to—especially after the discovery that Baker had been a client of the house. “She was really an incredible, empowered woman,” Chiuri said in a preview at Dior headquarters. She dedicated the spring haute couture to her, and surrounded the show with a gallery of portraits commissioned from Mickalene Thomas featuring a new pantheon of similarly ground-breaking Black and biracial Hollywood actors and models of the 20th century, with Josephine Baker at its center.Instead of leaning literally on the famous imagery of Baker as a showgirl, Chiuri took a more subtle, pared-back approach. She’d studied, too, less well-known photographs of Baker in restaurants, wearing day-suits, and in uniform during the war. The collection was all the more quietly powerful for it.“The line in this collection is more ’20s,” she said. “More clean, less volume, more my attitude.” Her project, as she sees it more generally at Christian Dior, is “to renovate” and render the classical canon of the house to be lighter and easier to wear—and especially, now, to answer the growing requests from couture customers for daywear.There were shimmery Deco-like beaded shifts that somehow recalled flapper dresses, for sure. Definite moments of green-room looks, with silver tap-pants or structured lingerie, but covered up with velvet dressing gown coats. A third of the way in came an outstanding gold cloque midi suit, the jacket recalling the iconic 1947 Bar jacket, but structured, sans corsetry to skim the body rather than nip.She took the same clever approach to de-boning and un-fussifying the grandeur of the off-the-shoulder Dior ballgown, using artfully creased satins, in slate gray, liquid silver, or pale gold. These effects had a beautiful simplicity—like ideal heirloom dresses rediscovered in a family trunk.
But the real surprises were in the time Chuiri took to show her sober and impeccably-cut tailoring: the simplicity of double-breasted Dior gray skirt suits; a minimally perfect tuxedo coat; long, slim silhouettes in black. All there was in the way of decoration was on the feet: velvet, embroidered, ankle-strapped platform sandals. It will surely be more than enough to have modern-minded clients racing to Christian Dior to fill that yawning gap in chic things to wear for the day.
23 January 2023
On the fall Christian Dior runway, Maria Grazia Chiuri looked to the future and the ways in which technology will reshape—and is reshaping—fashion. Her spring show today was a glance back at the past via the Italian noblewoman turned French queen Catherine de Medici, whose influence at court was not least of all sartorial. “The idea was to play with this reference and how much fashion and power are in dialogue,” Chiuri said.The collection had an element of autobiography. Chiuri, too, is an Italian in France, one whose job it is to shape fashion, and she’s had no little success in her six years at Dior, as anyone who has walked by the new Avenue Montaigne flagship with its lines of shoppers can attest. Doing research, she discovered a map of Paris in the archive dating to the house founder’s time, with Avenue Montaigne at its center (in most maps of Paris the street is further to the left; it’s not the actual center of the city). Chiuri made it a focal point of the collection, printing it the way she might the familiar toile de Jouy on a cotton trench coat, whose efficient modernity offered a counterpoint to the historical shapes that were a focus here.De Medici is credited with introducing corsets, platform heels, and Italian lace to the French court. Look 1 put the Dior atelier’s fine craftsmanship on display, its hoop cage overlaid with yards of black raffia lace. But if this was a dialogue about fashion and power, it was also a conversation between past and present. That historical skirt was paired with a bra top of the sort Chiuri’s daughter Rachele, a trusted adviser, might wear to a party. A dress with the fit-and-flare shape that is a house signature was made with drawstrings, lending it an adaptability and a sportif feel that would have been alien to Monsieur Dior.Also getting a rethink were New Look skirts in floral-embroidered cotton, patchworks of broderie anglaise, or that map print, which Chiuri split down the middle and paired with matching shorts. Three cities’ worth of shows confirms for anyone who was still unsure that the new generation’s views about exposure and bareness diverge from that of their elders. Chiuri embraces that difference. The Bar Jacket was only notable for its absence, and de Medici’s corset was utterly freed of its restrictive connotations. Chiuri treated it more like an accessory, showing it unfastened and easy over blousy shirts.
The stage was set with a grotto made by the French artist Eva Jospin, its sublime intricacies belying its humble cardboard construction. Chiuri also recruited the Dutch choreographers Imre and Marne van Opstal and their troupe to perform a carnally charged dance. The collaborations extended to Tassinari & Chatel by Lelièvre Paris, responsible for the silk embroideries that appeared near the end of the show. What most impressed, however, was the raffia, which Chiuri had woven into tops, skirts, and a coat, as fine as any lace and real height-of-her-powers stuff.
27 September 2022
When Maria Grazia Chiuri saw the work of the Ukrainian artist Olesia Trofymenko in spring, she knew she wanted to work with her for her fall haute couture show. “I saw this work of hers in Maxxi, the contemporary art museum in Rome, in which she embroidered onto a painted landscape,” said the designer. “When I saw this piece, I understood that the reference in the embroidery comes from Ukrainian folk costume.”After discussion, the artist, who lives in Kyiv, suggested using an element of Ukrainian folklore, the Tree of Life, as an emblematic theme. The idea resonated with Chiuri. Not just because (presumably) she wanted to support and spotlight the work of an artist in time of war, but also because the symbolism of the Tree of Life occurs across so many cultures and religions. “It speaks about the circle of life,” Chiuri observed backstage while the show was about to take to the runway, in a tent pitched in the garden of the Musée Rodin. “And we have to remember all the time. In some way we need to rethink again now, to move to the future.”The part of Christian Dior’s foundation story that feels so relevant to Chiuri right now is the fact that he set up his couture house right after World War II. The thrill of his clothes brought not just beauty and optimism to clients, but also a renewal of livelihoods to French workers all along the supply chain. This is a point the house of Dior kept pushing during the pandemic. Were they going to stop showing, or begin showing less, because of the pandemic? No they were not. There are too many people—skilled people, and freelance people—involved in the production of collections and shows to let it go.The scale of it all, now that audiences and clients are back, is every bit as big as it ever was. To Chiuri’s mind, though, haute couture is an intimate practice, a matter which is very much between the client and the craftspeople who are behind making their clothes. There was a sense of gentleness and reserve in the color palette of white and pale beige this season; a similarity in the long silhouettes, variously rendered as big-sleeved blouses, tiny jackets and capes. But all the glory was in the intricate surfaces, in particular in the way flowers, especially the Dior rose, were worked into lace patchworks and deeply encrusted 3-D beaded embroidery.If anything, it was less of a classic ‘Dior’ collection from Chuiri—at least until you looked closely.
Then you realized that Dior corsetry had simply migrated into almost dirndl-like dresses, and that the season’s iterations of the Bar jacket were actually entirely constructed from amazingly finely pleated hand-smocking. “Some of the work is not so visible; it’s invisible except to the client,” Chiuri said.The whole collection felt quietly romantic, less rigid. Chiuri had also reimagined Dior’s flowers—his love of roses—and also somehow related it back to the folk costume embroideries that became a basis of the collection. Respect for atelier staffs has been a topic of conversation this week, but for Chiuri that goes beyond the importance of keeping good people salaried “because,” as she put it, “we have the responsibility to build bridges with the craft and this dialogue.”
4 July 2022
An Andalusian Christian Dior drama played out in the center of Seville: the stage held by two black-clad gypsy flamenco stars, 40 dancers, and a 110 resort looks which walked against the backdrop of the Plaza de Espana. Maria Grazia Chiuri had immersed herself in researching the traditions, crafts, histories, and female heroes of this region of southern Spain. “I really love the area,” she said in a preview. “You feel that tradition is really alive here. I recognize a lot of myself in this Mediterranean idea of women. I’ve felt a strong link and connection.”The female flamenco dancer, giving her leaping, stamping, head-tossing performance in a black velvet suit was an almost exact reincarnation of the woman who had chiefly inspired Chiuri. “She was Carmen Amaya, who was the first female flamenco dancer to wear men’s clothes, in the 1950s. They called her La Capitana—a great name! She went to Paris and became very famous.” That one image started her off on a masculine-tailoring footing. Out strode an opening section of clean, lean, super high-waisted matador pants, embroidery, and passementerie, topped with locally-made men’s sombreros in black and white, and looks referencing the pristine equestrian uniforms of Spanish riding schools.It was a pitch-perfect device for Chiuri, who’s imprinted her idea of androgynous, feminist dressing on Christian Dior from the first. She followed with romantic but reined-in references to off-the-shoulder flounced flamenco dresses in taffeta, subtle layerings of darkly sexy lace and black leather, black and white “arabesque” prints; then intensely detailed silhouettes in a deep carnation red.As is usual for Dior these days, she’d been all around the region to form relationships with makers and artisans in the months ahead of the show. The hats, directed by Stephen Jones were made by the Fernandez Y Roche atelier and inspired by photos of the Duchess of Alba riding with Jackie Kennedy. The fringed and embroidered Manila shawls (adapted as capes with Christian Dior stitched into them) were made by Maria Jose Sanchez Espinar. There were—appropriately for the subject of the season—reiterations of the Christian Dior Saddle Bag, one of them in collaboration with the leather craftsman Javier Menacho Guisado.
This is partly to do with the new politics of cruise travel: for any major fashion house to airlift a huge audience to a destination, and then leave without demonstrably benefiting the host population is increasingly liable to be called out as questionable. But to Chiuri, finding local crafts specialists to work with is more than corporate box-ticking. Going back, the original strategy behind the cruise travel shows was to echo Christian Dior’s own global reach, she said (as he visited so many countries to set up licenses with foreign partners). “But I think this link now has to evolve in a different way to work with local craftspeople.” Besides, this is how she really loves working. It gives me energy. It’s very difficult to work without this exchange with people. I travel, go to factories and ateliers, one or two trips with the team. It’s not only about fashion and creativity. It’s an empathic moment. I don’t work so much in the office,” she laughed. “Actually, I find that super boring.”
17 June 2022
A wired woman walked out first at the Dior show, her bodysuit outlined in light-up-in-the-dark fluorescent green. The walls of the set featured images of women with two sets of eyes. The atmosphere radiated an equivalent of the double-consciousness of an audience looking at fashion while anxiously checking its phones for news of the war in Ukraine.That tension was the unintended consequence of the toxic twist of timing. The images of protection and hinted-at derivatives of armor which immediately surfaced to the naked eye in the collection cannot have had anything directly to do with how Maria Grazia Chiuri had planned out the spirit and execution of her fall show months ago. But still: this collection was her most daring bid yet to engage Christian Dior—and its Bar jacket, corset and New Look swirly midi—with advancing modernity and technology. With a side-nod toDune, and, of course, Chiuri’s underpinning framework of female empowerment, courtesy of her relationships with feminist artists.“We have this idea that technology is something just a little bit unreal,” Chiuri contended before the show. “We use technology more for communication, and think less about how it can help us to live better. We are used to expecting it in very practical things: washing machines, but not fashion.”Look 2 in the show was an inside-out demo of how a Bar jacket (with the form of its traditional 1950s inner padding exposed) had the potential to become a 2022 climate-sensitive garment. Cool when the wearer feels hot, and vice versa. This, and other pieces in the show (in which the technology was not so obvious) were the result of a collaboration with D-Air Lab, a technical specialist Italian company which makes safe, functional clothing and materials for sports, industrial and other non-fashion purposes.Chiuri liked the challenge of finding co-habiting synergies between Dior’s sober gray suiting and feminine chiffon dresses and technical biker jackets, football shoulder pads and protective racing gloves. That went right down to the shoes—Roger Vivier’s original ’50s Louis heels for Dior, but with technical “anti-twist” ankle straps, and vividly collaged beading.What came over best was some amazing knitwear—again due to new Italian industrial technology. Light years from a cozy sweater, a beautifully fine cobwebby lace bodice on a fluffy tiered skirt was entirely knitted by computerized machine.
Ditto the delicate sunray pleats of another midi dress, where the intersecting strands made the skirt swirl transparently in the light. There were passages of skirt suits with asymmetric hems, substantial daywear with checked tweeds and dissected trenches to add to all this, followed up with diaphanous chiffon for evening.The environmental ambience was created by the Italian feminist artist Mariella Bettineschi, who reimagines the objectified female subjects of “Old Masters” as women and girls with their own agency and ability to perceive things outside of patriarchy and colonialism. Chiuri transferred the appellation of the artist’s work “The Next Era” to her own collection, with the artist’s permission.The artistic concept symbolically looks forward to a time when women will take over the running of the world and do it in a better way. Against a background of aggression by a murderous megalomaniacal male-run state, that hope looks more poignant—yet more vital—than ever.
1 March 2022
Maria Grazia Chiuri always speaks so passionately about craftsmanship and the human touch, it would have been a wasted opportunity not to get her reaction to the new year’s favorite talking point: the metaverse. “Oh, I don’t. I’m not,” she said, with zero hesitation. “I’m not interested in this moment, it’s more important to speak about humanity. I’d like us to be more together and support each other, and put value on work. Probably, I’m a little bit old-fashioned, but I’m more interested in the real thing. I prefer to spend time with real people.”Her Christian Dior collection was an investment in human connection. Foregoing any direct references, Chiuri devoted it to the masterful but often unobvious constructions unique to haute couture garments, which are hand-crafted by experts workingtogether. Through a crystallizing palette of black, white, and grays, she demonstrated the difference between said construction and the surface decoration people often mistake it for. “The craftsmanship that finishes [a garment] is not valued. It’s as if embroidery is something that’s only decorative, that it’s not really part of the design process,” she said.During fittings a few days before the show, Chiuri demonstrated her point in the studio. A long ecru cashmere cape was pieced together with embroidery— not plain stitching—so invisible it looked as if the entire shape had been knitted in one piece. She explained how a guipure-like embroidered breastplate in silk crepe with silk cord threads was actually part of the construction of a long black silk cady dress, and not a decorative detail as a layman might assume. And to illustrate how embroidery can construct an entire silhouette, she produced the kicky geometric draw-string jumpsuit with crystal and jet tubing that opened the show. Watching it live, you’d have no idea that this was Chiuri’s premise for the collection, which only served to prove her point. So, to underline her theme, she decked out her show space in the garden of the Musée Rodin in highly graphic, gorgeous embroidered tapestries created by the artists Madhvi and Manu Parekh and hand-made by Chanakya, the school of crafts in India—with whom Chiuri always works—which educates women in generational crafts such as specialized embroidery. It took 380 artisans 280,000 hours to embroider the 340-square-meter installation, which will be open to the public from January 25 to 30 as an ephemeral art exhibition.
24 January 2022
Maria Grazia Chiuri has slapped a complete counter-reading of the received legend of what the world believes Christian Dior was like with her new pre-fall collection. “Even I had stereotypes [about Dior] when I came into the house,” she says. “But it’s a simplification of his work.” It’s a bit of a surprise: Instead of an excursion into romance and fragility, she’s lined up a gang of young women layered in punkish tartans, biker shorts, jackets, and ties, and rebellious takes on school uniforms.Chiuri described how her thought process was triggered by looking afresh at Dior’s close relationships with the women around him. One was the huge influence of his heroic sister Catherine, whose little-known life as a member of the French resistance has been carefully and shockingly documented by Justine Picardie in her new book,Miss Dior.“She was a brave and unconventional woman,” Chiuri says. Others include the strong-minded characters who helped him build his house: the flamboyant, eccentric Mitzah Bricard, a lover of the leopard spot; Suzanne Luling, Dior's press officer and childhood friend; and Madame Raymonde Zehnacker, director of the Dior design studio.Chiuri’s research into the archive—even the evidence of the variety of silhouettes she says she’s observed there—served her with quite a different take on the histories that were written about Dior after his death in 1957. Those histories tend to paint him as the lone genius who put women into the corseted, escapist dresses that revolutionized fashion as exemplified in his 1947 New Look. “The truth is that the house of Christian Dior was a community of men and women—together.”“The first thing that put me on alert was reading his autobiography,Dior and I,” Chiuri says. His voice seemed to hint at a far more nuanced narrative than the monolithic mythologizing that was built into the posthumous story. “He could do severe, gray tailoring or the Miss Dior couture dress that was full of flowers. Contradiction is part of the beauty of fashion.”Of course, the search for contemporary relevance—the task that every Christian Dior creative director takes up, season in, season out—all this depends on who’s looking, and when. What Chiuri has built her reputation on is looking for threads of sisterhood (a theme that literally became the woven backdrop to her last haute couture collection), and opportunities for feminist T-shirt messaging for Gen Z’ers.
This time—chiming in among androgynous, sporty pieces—the slogan of the season is from Simone de Beauvoir: “Femininity is a trap.” It turns out to be a headline from an article she wrote forVoguein March 1947. Amazing to think our great-grandmothers read it here first.
14 December 2021
For the first big rendezvous of Paris Fashion Week in real life, Maria Grazia Chiuri served up a mod-pop happening at Christian Dior. All leggy dresses, tiny tailored suits, and flashes of bra tops, it was both a throwback to the ’60s youth revolution and a throw forward to what she summed up as the young fashion-comeback impulse of the moment: “Something graphic and clean, minimal and positive. Because I think we have to give an optimistic outlook to the future.”As her models were lining up backstage, about to take their places on a circular installation that evoked a colorful imaginary board game under swirling disco lights, Chiuri was talking about the buildup to confronting what it meant to be doing a show again. “I think it’s impossible to have stopped for two years and not think about that,” she said. “You have to ask, Why do you do your job? Why are people interested in fashion? I think you have to accept that fashion is a game. Like all games, there’s a part that is serious and a part that is fun. People love fashion because it helps them perform in their lives. People dress to represent themselves in the moment, and they are performing in a different way, changing all the time. And the show is the performance of fashion; it’s also a performance art.” Then she laughed. “So at the end you have to accept that you want to play this nonsense of a game.”To find a form to get these ideas across, she’d connected with the Italian artist Anna Paparatti, now 85, who devised the scenography and backdrop around the conceptual board-game-inspired Pop art she’d made in the 1960s. In her 20s, Paparatti was part of the international avant-garde art and music scene that gathered in the Piper Club in Rome. “I was really fascinated to talk to her,” said Chiuri. “The idea was for her to create this show space that gives you this idea of everyone performing, all together.”For the clothes, she looked again into the Dior archive, struck by the contemporaneous proto-mod collection Marc Bohan made for the house in 1961, known as the Slim Look collection. “He broke with the past and introduced Dior to the prêt-à-porter world,” said Chiuri. “I think this part of the history of Dior is very close to my taste, my spirit.”Cue her springboard to thinking about how to design A-line baby doll dresses, miniaturized Dior suits, optic-white ’60s space-age-flavored shifts, and tennis dresses for 21st-century girls.
There were color-block paneled coats and skirts; single punches of orange and pea green; a couple of go-go dancer gold-fringe minidresses. To Chiuri’s credit, it never veered into vintage-revivalist territory. She’s a pragmatic designer with an eye for reading the mood of the moment—down to the varieties of flat, cross-laced sandals and modernized square-toe, tiny block-heel Mary Janes that grafted the comfort of sneaker technology onto the idea of a classic shoe. For young women who’ve never even heard of the 1960s youthquake, there was plenty to relate to here.
28 September 2021
Against the backdrop of a vast panoramic hand-embroidered landscape, Maria Grazia Chuiri’s Christian Dior haute couture collection represented her emotional response to standing up for the interdependence between couture and all the people who work to craft its materials. Coming back to in-person shows after three seasons made her want to reconnect with “being present,” through the awareness of the tactility of amazing hand-made textiles—that specialist, unseen chain of people in the fashion industry without which the practice of haute couture could not exist.In a real way, her celebration of hand-loomed tweeds and the stitch-work carried out by embroiderers and silk manufacturers is the part haute couture will play in building back the post-pandemic economy on a larger scale—exactly as Christian Dior did with the explosion of fashion consumption in the post-war years of the 1950s. “I think for the people working around the tables at our ateliers again, there was a different, incredible kind of energy in working towards this show,” Chiuri said. The atmosphere and collective sense of purpose—even the enjoyment of working hard against a deadline—has been quite different from striving to get pieces together to be shot for Dior’s films during the pandemic. They kept on reassuring her, “don’t worry, we are tired, but we are happy!”The big question of what fashion will look like in the world we are re-emerging into was answered by Chuiri in a primary focus on daywear. Had you not known how much meaning was woven into the materials, the top-to-toe silhouettes of gray tweeds or camel cashmere might have suggested the lasting echo of the long walks in nature that entire populations have been taking during the last year and a half. Seen against the conceptual landscape murals, designed by the French contemporary artist Eva Jospin, the models, in flat hiking boots or woven mesh slippers. were however also walking past a piece that was commissioned “in solidarity with India.”Every one of the minute stitches of the mural was made by the Indian embroidery school that Chiuri encouraged Christian Dior to support with training for young women for the last few years. Jospin said she in turn had been inspired by studying the walls of the Indian Embroidery Room at the Palazzo Colonna in Italy.
Somehow, all roads in this collection led back to Rome, which happens to be the very city where Chiuri first learned the detail of everything that goes into the making of beautiful, luxurious fashion at Fendi and Valentino.
5 July 2021
When a lockdown whim compelled Maria Grazia Chiuri to rearrange the furniture in her Paris apartment to make space for a pilates machine, she was responding to an instinct as old as time. “Sport is movement, sport is freedom. During lockdown, you would walk around your building just to get a sense of moving your body. That became our idea of freedom,” she said on a video call from Athens.Her confinement reflections took her Dior Cruise show to a birthplace of sports, the Panathenaic Stadium, where Ancient Greeks worked up a sweat circa 330 BC. “I decided to show here because I’m interested in clothes as a way of giving freedom of movement,” Chiuri explained, echoing our post-pandemic desires. A reminder that restrictions are by no means history, ongoing travel complications meant that her show was largely attended by local press and clients, who were treated to a Greco-electro performance by the Greek-American singer Ioanna Gika.In her first focused study of sportswear, Chiuri bridged the technical properties of the sporty genre with the couture-informed craftsmanship normally viewed as its polar opposite. Clean, cream activewear walked the stadium’s 185-meter laps, occasionally interrupted by sweats elevated with abstract prints. Searching for a tailored answer to that same feeling, Chiuri paid homage to Marlene Dietrich’s white suit, a reference prompted by an old photograph of the icon dressed up as Leda (who made her own cameo in a Björk-tastic swan dress at the end). Chiuri exercised her de- and reconstruction of Christian Dior’s old tropes, athleticizing the Bar Jacket by removing its lining and sportifying its fabrication. For all its oversized white trainers, this wasn’t really about sportswear, though, but about the desires that make us adapt sporty cuts and fabrics into our everyday wardrobes.Part of a new generational spirit is a lack of patience with complicated fashions. Instead, young people imbue conventional dress codes with an expectation for comfort and ease. That territory is a walk in the park for Chiuri—or make that a sprint! Values of functionality, movement, and comfort are ingrained in her cultural inheritance and her practice at Dior. “I come from Roma, don’t forget. Around me, the reference of Greece is everywhere, on every statue. It’s my background,” she said. Those genetics were never more pronounced than in the peplos dresses that epitomized the collection.
They are a constant in Chiuri’s work, but at the Panathenaic Stadium she found the most authentic stage to examine just why she loves this most original garment—the mother of all dresses—so much. She worked the peplos that opened the show like a parachute dress, sportifying it with drawstrings and drawing a contrast to the classic Hellenic dresses that closed the show.
17 June 2021
With no reason to dress up, be seen, or—on some days—even look in the mirror, the past year has been an opportunity to reconsider a culture of vanity that was running on overload. Now we talk about a wardrobe reset: a post-lockdown reduction of excess to an appearance moreessential. Yet the ego-centric mentality of the social media era—the “So-Me” era—wants what it wants. Confined to our homes, digital narcissism has intensified, from casually staged self-portraits on the iPhone auto-capture to the timeless attraction of the mirror selfie. On video calls, we are constantly confronted with our own thumbnail reflection staring back at us.“You’re talking to a woman who has no mirrors in her house. I probably have one mirror and it’s behind my bathroom door,” Maria Grazia Chiuri said, speaking from Paris on one of those video calls. “Can you imagine me taking a picture of myself in the mirror? Impossible! It’s not something that’s on my mind. I prefer something more simple and real. But I’m probably a different generation.” TitledDisturbing Beauty, she filmed her Christian Dior show in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, a gallery created by a self-deifying 17th-century crown so it could mirror itself in its own greatness.Chiuri lined the hall with artworks by the Italian artist Silvia Giambrone: mirrors waxed to obscure the reflection, riddled with thorns like something out ofBeauty and the Beast. “She sees the relationship we have with the mirror as an attraction, but at the same time, repulsion,” the designer said. There, alongside her models, performers choreographed by Sharon Eyal engaged in passionate dialogues with the mirrors. “It’s as if she advises the young girls on the runway: ‘If you want to build your identity, don’t look yourself in the mirror,’” Chiuri said. “It’s something we talked about a lot. If you want to concentrate, you can’t look at your reflection.”Written by Madame de Villeneuve in 1740—and adapted for the screen by Jean Cocteau in 1946, just as the New Look was launching—Beauty and the Beast’s gloomy motifs of vanity and judgement inspired Chiuri to interpret it for our contemporary situation. She layered the collection with themes from fairy tales centered around ideas of appearance vs. character:Cinderella,Little Red Riding HoodandSleeping Beauty, stories re-recorded by Charles Perrault in Versailles in the 18th century.
It inspired a collection suspended between the idea of the classic and timeless wardrobe that feels essential now, and the alluring danger of the fairy-tale world.
8 March 2021
In dealing with the tarot in her haute couture collection, Maria Grazia Chiuri made the choice to follow one of the arcane, mystical paths that surface in cataclysmic times when humanity strives to negotiate with the hand of fate. “What was nice for me about the tarot is that when you are in a difficult moment, something that is magical can help us, to help us think better,” she said on a Zoom call from Paris. The emotional impact of pandemic isolation is one reason that she went that way. “It’s a long time we’ve all been staying alone. You think much more about many aspects of yourself and your life,” she observed. “That’s my belief: This year changed us a lot.”For a second time, she commissioned the director Matteo Garrone to make a filmed interpretation. “We decided to film a story about this girl who goes inside a castle. It’s a labyrinth which represents an interior trip. When she meets each of (the tarot) figures, she has to reach a decision about her life. And on the other hand, she meets aspects of her own personality and learns not to be scared of the future.” The protagonist encounters the High Priestess, Temperance, Justice, and Death. There are Renaissance-inflected high-waisted corseted bodices, stately brocade robes, and delicate plissé dresses. Destiny arrives—apparently in symbolic melding of masculine-feminine identities—with a naked kiss in a bath.Well, the ability to foretell the future—what will move people to want to buy in a few months’ time—is ever-present in the job description of a designer. Christian Dior believed it. “He discovered tarot in the Second World War, when his sister Catherine, who was part of the French Resistance, disappeared,” Chiuri explained. “In my view, I think he was so scared about her situation that he probably went to the tarot cards to try to know some more, to hope that she would come back. I think he was very worried; trying to find hope in some signs.”That poignant, little-known House of Dior foundational story is about to be revealed when a book about the life of Catherine Dior by Justine Picardie is published in the fall. Chiuri accompanied the author in the research, uncovering the harrowing story of Catherine’s imprisonment in the Ravensbrück women’s concentration camp; how she consoled herself with a love of gardening when she was liberated, and how she inspired her brother to weave flowers and femininity into his work ever after.
Chiuri found a whole other serendipitous reading of her own in the complex web of mystery and history behind the tarot. The reason for her collection’s reinvented iconography—its atmosphere of a gilded Italian-medieval-flavored fantasia—is that its history originates in Chiuri’s home country. Part of her inspiration came from studying the first known set of cards, known as the Visconti-Sforza deck, which was made by Bonifacio Bembo around 1400 to entertain the family of the Duke of Milan. Three centuries later, it was the French who ascribed mystical, fortune-divining powers to the cards, and renamed it the tarot. So, there we are: the deep Dior-Chiuri French-Italian background binding together the season’s collection.
25 January 2021
According to post-pandemic trend forecasts, 2020 has made fashion puritans of us all. Awakened by the simple life in lockdown, we are supposedly emerging with an ascetic and sensible approach to “investment shopping”: that classic black wool coat, that navy jumper, that comfy trouser. “But I don’t want a black coat,” Maria Grazia Chiuri said on a video call from Paris, breaking out in laughter. “I want a leopard coat!” The Christian Dior designer was in high spirits, illustrating the objective she set herself with her most animated collection to date. “Now, we desire something that gives us energy. Something completely different,” as she put it.“After this year—so intense, so depressing—I would like to come back to the fashion that started my career: the playfulness that attracted me and my generation to fashion, and transform the Dior codes through this attitude,” she said. For Chiuri, a child of the 1970s, those roads had to lead to Elio Fiorucci. Back then, she and her friends would congregate in his fabled store, synchronically dressed in the designer’s angel motif T-shirts, denim pants, colored plastic boots, and transparent handbags.“My generation was super influenced by pop culture,” she recalled. “At Fiorucci we saw another way of fashion. It was probably the moment that fashion was born in Italy, because we left our traditional clothes to go to this toy store and discover clothes we’d never seen in our life: different materials, and clothes from around the world.” In her archives, Chiuri found a postwar parallel to that exuberance in the leopard-print coat Christian Dior made for the fabulous Mizza Bricard, a woman so devoted to having a good time that she never got out of bed before 2 p.m.In the year of lockdowns and curfews, that spirit—along with an art study on Pop that included Andy Warhol, Richard Hamilton, and Marco Lodola—compelled Chiuri to create an uncharacteristically colorful collection. Outfits traversed a silver jumpsuit, graphic see-through raincoats, skimpy skirt suits in Technicolor checks, T. rex prints, and mirror-sequined party dresses. It showed a cheekier side to the designer, whose work is often characterized by exhaustive research and a commitment to using her platform for activism. In her ateliers, she said, “We decided that when this is all over, we’re each going to choose a different color dress and have a big party. That’s the dream: to dance together.”
14 December 2020
Coined in quarantine, concepts of #WFH,physicality, and comfortwear must have been a feast for the pragmatic eye of Maria Grazia Chiuri. High fashion’s foremost ergonomist, the Christian Dior designer was on a quest to unite the desirable with the wearable long before lockdown set in—and to the tune of the till bell, mind you. In the changed fashion landscape of 2020, she explained that her mission has intensified. “We had to approach this collection with an idea more of design. We are living in a different way and staying more at home within our intimacy. Our clothes have to reflect this new style of life.”Presented to a socially distanced audience in a tent in the Jardin des Tuileries, her collection was—rest assured—a far cry from the cashmere track tops and cocktail earrings of “Zoom dressing,” but a study in how one might adapt the tailored silhouette of Christian Dior (hardly your kick-back-and-relax type of kit) to a comfy new wardrobe sensibility. “This is very far from the Dior look, because Dior was a couture house. The idea of construction was really stiff,” Chiuri acknowledged. “The most important issue for me was to realize the new Dior silhouette: the jacket with the shirt and the pants. I think that is what really represents the feeling of the moment. I cross my fingers.”Early in the show, that holy trinity was expressed to such extremes you wouldn’t have guessed these garments had been derived from the idea of the Dior suit. Jackets ballooned into dressing gowns, shirts elongated into tunics, and trousers grew ever slouchier in width. Chiuri covered the whole thing in Mediterranean paisleys, mixing it up with her favorite peplos dresses and Roman sandals. “For a long time, there was a moment in fashion when clothes had to have a dialogue with other people, to express your opinion to other people. At this moment in time, I think it’s more about a personal relationship with ourselves,” Chiuri reflected. “You want to take care of yourself. I feel that, so I think other people need that feeling too.”She applied her philosophy to less abstract jacket-trouser-shirt constellations toward the end of the show in a series of boxy trouser and skirt suits that centered on defining an hourglass silhouette by gently emphasizing its waist. It wasn’t about constricting the body but about enfolding its natural curves, proposing how comfortwear might work in a more formal wardrobe.
If comfy-looking clothes don’t exactly conjure images of the glamour many hanker for post-lockdown, Chiuri threw in some frilly flou that felt like a proposition for something more seductive. Barely touching the skin, those dresses were entirely at home within her principles of body liberation.Researching the collection, Chiuri’s findings brought her back to her native Italy, which has—unlike the formal French salons in which she now finds herself—historically embraced a less fantastical and more realistic approach to fashion. Through conversations with the 1960s functionalist designer Nanni Strada, she learned about comfortable garment constructions. Rediscovering the work of artist Lucia Marcucci, whose woman-centric collages from the 1960s played with the media’s image of women versus the liberation voices on the rise at the time, she asked the director Alina Marazzi to make a film about her.It screened online before the show, the set of which was surrounded by Marcucci’s retro collages interpreted in the stained glass of cathedral windows. Cheekily nailing the show’s themes of freedom, her sound designer, Michel Gaubert, enlisted a group called Roseblood to performSangu di Rose, a moody 19th-century piece in which women sing about their newfound lack of limitation after their husbands have all been sent to prison. After months in lockdown, that one was up for individual interpretation.
29 September 2020
Watch the Christian Dior resort 2021 show live by clicking on the livestream tab above.Resort shows have become a flash point for the fashion industry. The pandemic has brands rethinking their expense, their environmental impact, and the designer burnout they’re responsible for, and some big names have pledged to cancel them. On the other hand, it’s a crucial collection, the one that stays in stores and on e-commerce sites longest without going on sale. Christian Dior’s CEO Pietro Beccari is a firm believer in the season. “People have to do what’s best for their own brands, but Dior has lived since 1946 by the sparkle of energy that is given by fashion shows. That’s our DNA; that’s our business,” he said on a WhatsApp call. “I strongly believe that we will go ahead with pre-collections. Also, cruise collections are our way to tell stories.”That’s why the French house went to such extraordinary steps to stage tonight’s Dior cruise show. The setting was the Piazza del Duomo in Lecce, a small town in Puglia, in the heel of Italy’s boot. Southern Italy was a month later to reopen than the northern part of the country, and Lecce was a difficult place to get to even in the Before Times. Aside from the models, Dior’s extensive teams, and a smattering of clients, it was locals who gathered to watch the show in the front row and on the balconies beyond the square. In that sense, it was very much thefesta di piazzathat the house’s creative director Maria Grazia Chiuri envisioned. The celebrities, influencers, and members of the fashion press that typically attend Dior’s destination events were among the 20 million digital viewers Beccari expected to tune in. The house’s couture and men’s shows both hit that number earlier this month.The locals were absolutely the story here. As Chiuri has made her custom with Dior’s recent resort collections, she spotlighted the region’s native crafts and craftspeople. The collaborations were made all the more resonant by the fact they were accomplished in the midst of the shutdown. Marinella Senatore conceptualized theluminariethat lined the piazza, some of which were reproduced in the collection’s prints. Marilena Sparacsi was responsible for the rare tombolo embroidery that embellished one of Chiuri’s dresses. And the collection’s woven pieces were created by the Le Constantine Foundation, which was established by sisters Giulia and Lucia Starace to preserve this form of textile design.
The orchestra and dance company were local, too, and the press release delineated many other partners.
22 July 2020
There was no traffic jam on the rue de Varenne, no walk through the Rodin Museum, no scrum of street style photographers waiting in its Garden of Orpheus, and certainly no giant tent behind it.Le confinementmade the staging of a Christian Dior haute couture show and the experiencing of its grand rituals impossible. Instead, last Friday, Maria Grazia Chiuri was booked solid with Zoom calls. “It’s our first couture presentation online, so it’s something very unusual,” she said.Chiuri enlisted her friend Matteo Garrone, the Italian filmmaker who directed last year’sPinocchio,to create a short surrealist movie titledLe Mythe Dior.With no runway to design for, Chiuri’s concept for the season was Théâtre de la Mode. In 1945, amid the devastation of World War II and with materials in short supply, Paris designers created clothes for doll forms one-third the size of their human female counterparts. Miniature dresses and tailleurs by 60 French couturiers and their mannequins were displayed at the Louvre and the exhibition was such a marvel—the clothes and accessories were made with such exacting care, with functioning buttons and handbags filled with tiny wallets and powder compacts—it went on to tour the world, raising funds for French war survivors in the process.During the Zoom preview, Chiuri’s creations were displayed in a prodigious trunk on mannequins, which is how Dior couture clients around the globe will engage with them. Like the “Théâtre de la Mode” wonders of 75 years ago, Chiuri’s scaled-down day looks and gowns were painstakingly made. They truly give the termpetite mainsnew meaning, but she reported that the task this season brought her team and the Dior studio workers—all working from home and all connecting via phone call or video conference during the shutdown—a lot of joy. “The project was very positive,” she said. “Seeing the first prototype, there was a strong spirit of community.” Doll-size clothes are fairly irresistible, as Garrone’s fantasia aims to demonstrate—even a statue can’t resist their allure. But the rewards of satisfying work can’t be underestimated and the movie’s scenes of Dior artisans and seamstresses lovingly filmed working behind the scenes are equally compelling. Amidst the crushing unemployment of COVID-19 time, even more so.Chiuri’s “muses” this season seem chosen with that notion in mind.
On the call she name-checked the likes of Lee Miller, Dora Maar, and Jacqueline Lamba—20th-century women who are often remembered by history for their beauty or for their famous lovers and husbands, but in fact did important work of their own as artists. Chiuri’s own work for Dior is unmistakable, even at one-third size: The diaphanous gowns—in embroidered tulle, in pleated chiffon, in meticulously patch-worked pastel lace—are fairy tales come to life.InLe Mythe Dior,couriers bring a trunk of shrunken clothes to the woods. In this fairy tale, the magic that transforms them into real garments is the couture atelier, and the nymphlike protagonists get to keep the dresses. Reality intrudes, though. The narrowness of the film’s cast illustrates that when it comes to fashion and the inclusiveness of intersectional feminism, there’s work yet to be done.
6 July 2020
“When women strike the world stops.” “Patriarchy = climate emergency.” “Consent. Consent. Consent.” Since arriving at Christian Dior, Maria Grazia Chiuri has used her runways to amplify feminist discourse, but this show resonated more powerfully than some of the others. Yesterday, Harvey Weinstein’s New York rape trial ended in a guilty verdict. This afternoon, as we sat assembled underneath the flashing neon signs made in collaboration with the anonymous artist collective Claire Fontaine, it was impossible not to feel a twinge of vindication—the righteous fury of the #MeToo movement replaced temporarily by satisfaction. Finally, what women have been saying for years is having real-life consequences.Chiuri dates her own feminist awakening to her 1970s youth in Rome, a time of marches, when relations between the sexes, and what women chose to wear, were being politicized for the first time. At a preview she said this collection started with snapshots of herself as a teenager with her seamstress mom. “It’s a very personal visual diary,” Chiuri explained. “The ’70s gave me the attitude I have.”Though the show opened with a tailored pantsuit, Chiuri has moved well beyond the house’s famous Bar jacket. In keeping with her starting point, this was Dior at its most informal and relaxed, an elevation of the quotidian: The designer says she identifies most with Marc Bohan’s tenure at the house. Bohan presided over Dior in those pivotal ’70s years, as prêt-à-porter was emerging and the once sacrosanct diktats of designers were starting to lose their sway. He dressed women who had embraced new, freer lifestyles, even launching a Dior ski line. In a sort of homage, on the runway today there were logo puffers, denim jackets and jeans, blanket checks modeled on a Bohan-designed bias-cut checked ensemble, jumpsuits in cotton or leather, and those dependable signifiers of youth: fishnets and combat boots. The season’s message tee read, “I Say I,” a phrase lifted from the Italian critic and activist Carla Lonzi that is more or less the 1970s equivalent of the millennial “you do you.”There was something almost humble about the collection, all the silk fringe that Chiuri used for her evening looks notwithstanding. It wasn’t workaday, but it wasn’t the skintight latex we saw elsewhere, either. Real clothes.
Chiuri, who sat at the table of honor across from Emmanuel Macron at last night’s Élysée Palace dinner for the Paris fashion community, has adopted what some might consider a contrarian attitude for a designer: “I want you to remember the woman—her attitude, her taste—not the designer who made her clothes.” That ties quite neatly back to the Claire Fontaine signs. I do I; you do you.
25 February 2020
Maria Grazia Chiuri joined forces with Judy Chicago to realize a project that the great American second-wave feminist artist imagined for a public sculpture to maternal power back in 1977. So, on the first day of the couture season, we entered the birth canal of Chicago’s installation, there to watch Chiuri summon a golden host of goddesses onto a womb-shaped runway.Over a six-month gestation, Chiuri’s conversation with Chicago birthed this idea about the pagan worship of goddesses and the struggle of women artists to find their own means of expression within the female-excluding patriarchal systems of the Western history of art. “The relationship between creativity and femininity really touched me, because I live that in a personal way,” Chiuri said. “And when Judy talked about this idea of goddesses, my mind immediately came back to my memories of the statues in Rome, of Botticelli, my point of view that is more Italian.”How could the practice of couture meld with feminist concepts? When it came down to it, Chiuri decided it lies in the relationship between fashion and the body. Her key was the Greco-Roman peplos. “It’s something which you really drape and tie, which you define with your body, which takes care of you,” she said. “So it’s very couture because in couture we don’t start with a pattern—we drape on a mannequin, we drape on our clients. But I didn’t want to just do it in dresses; I applied it to tailleurs and skirts as well because I want to speak about the heritage of the house.”So there were the Dior goddesses, walking in their Roman sandals, gilded and draped in the luxurious handmade techniques the ateliers can muster. She pointed out how the silken-fringe dresses are conjured without stitching, every fine strand of thread braided and left to flow. The infinite variety of what can be done with draped and twisted fabric came into play in diaphanous one-shoulder chiffon and twists of gold lamé tissue. In white, there was a wrap-over floor-length pleated shirtdress and a blouse and a skirt knotted to one side.Taking the theory to the suit, she opened necklines and dispensed with nipped and corseted waistlines. It ended with the outlying exception, a finale piece embroidered with a sequined, veiled moon—the powerful, ancient symbol of female fecundity.Chiuri wins approval for her constant amplification of feminist ideology and her inquiring mission to reach out to include a sense of global sisterhood across cultures.
The Chicago womb was hung with banners posing questions, pieces embroidered by a women’s project in India. At the end of the catwalk, the question read:What If Women Ruled the World?We would certainly do it all differently, that’s for sure. When it comes to the province of women’s fashion, more radical thinking needs to be done; ironically menswear is opening up the parameters for expressing identity more quickly at the moment. It would be amazing to see Chiuri freeing herself further to break the boundaries of convention. The ritual of using young, same-size models is one. What if haute couture was really demonstrated as a celebration of women of all ages, shapes, and cultures? That would be modern goddess power incarnate.
20 January 2020
Of the six collections that Maria Grazia Chiuri designs each year, pre-fall is the only one for which there is no show, no destination, no lush backdrop or performance. Presented studio-style, the looks appear with the exactitude of a study rather than as a spectacle suited to social media. Here, sans fantasy, you see Dior circa 2020 in the most wearable terms.Make no mistake, Chiuri seems to savor this stripped-back statement, since it puts the foundation of her “optimistic vision” on full display—from comfortable corset shapes to elegantly constructed anoraks. Checkered twinsets paired with miniskirts and equestrian boots; lengthened coatdresses worn open over pants; and crisp tie-dyed ensembles that register with arty polish show how she continues to rethink Monsieur Dior’s ladylike codes similar to the way in which an interior designer works within the existing architecture. “Fashion is a project, and we’re at a moment when we should be thinking how to renovate this project,” she said.A house like Dior, of course, is so well built that an effective renovation might entail little more than a cool new bag (the ongoing popularity of the Oblique tote) and some gorgeous embroidered dresses (the latest gowns with dimensional, delicate flowers or lustrous bronze stripes). But Chiuri, who specialized in industrial design before shifting to fashion, remains bent on bringing intellectual substance to the savoir faire. And for the first time this season, she put forth her own reflections and examinations based on extensive readings and research (her inspiration board was paneled in pages fromBianca e Blu Monica Bolzoni, a book about the forward thinking of a little-known Italian brand).The Manifesto by Maria Grazia Chiuri for Dior in This Millenniumis spaced throughout the lineup as 10 declarations, juxtaposed with photographs by Brigitte Niedermair. From the first, “Fashion is political. Fashion is desire,” to the last, “Choosing a dress is taking a stand,” they address sustainability, creative process, production, inclusivity, identity, and how the past informs the future.If a jacket in camo fil coupe or a black velvet tuxedo may not transmit these topics explicitly, a brand that takes a position on issues signals its relevance beyond the product offering. Chiuri, for one, is aware that people will invariably gravitate toward the pieces that feature Christian Dior in large letters, but she returned to the analogy of construction as a testament to timelessness.
“The fit must be perfect,” she insisted. “The signature is the value of the idea; the signature is not just the logo.”
11 December 2019
In Milan this season, the catwalks were awash in jungle imagery, with hovering fronds and glowering vines seemingly everywhere. Today at Christian Dior, which for many marks the beginning of Paris Fashion Week, the jungle became a forest—or perhaps an arbor—but of a strictly transitory stripe. For her Spring 2020 showing for the house, Maria Grazia Chiuri worked with the Paris-based environmental design collective Coloco, whose work regarding green spaces and urban regeneration she finds inspiring when thinking about sustainability. The “show trees” will soon be planted in projects around the city. And they are not solely European trees, Chiuri was quick to point out, as healthy gardens are, by design, heterogeneous. And so in the center of the Dior runway lay the central analogy for the show: Respect for diversityandnature will set us free.Add to this Chiuri’s other key source of inspiration for the season—Catherine Dior, sister of Christian—and the analogy gains weight and depth. Catherine, the “Miss” of Miss Dior, was a resistance fighter and concentration camp prisoner who emerged from the rubble of World War II to become an acclaimed gardener and botanist. She literally grew her way out of the postwar gloom with roses and wildflowers galore. Seventy years later we are on the verge of environmental disaster, and (horribly) internment camps abound: Ethically, historically, metaphorically, Dior-ifically, Chiuri and Dior are on point.And the clothes? Lovely, utterly lovely . . . gentle and shrewd and worthy of investment. The silhouettes were a hit parade of Chiuri classics: Jackets were boxy, pants slouched from a dropped crotch, dresses (high necklines, long sleeves, winsome transparency) grazed the ankles with a smidgen of volume gathered in the back. And the foot was resolutely grounded: by a perforated hiking boot, a logoed espadrille, an earthy flat. There was a cool men’s shirt in forget-me-not blue to layer under nifty tailoring. There was a small passage of looks in stone gray cotton that provided the chicest nod to utility on the runway in some time (the short boilersuit was adorable). There were bleached denim ombré pieces that consign all the many attempts at acid wash elsewhere to (’80s) shame.And then there were endless dresses—printed, appliquéd, embroidered, crystal-ed, filigreed—in which lace, raffia, jacquard, silk, and tulle were layered and interwoven to create thoroughly wonderful, artisanal items.
The sustainability piece that Chiuri offers at Dior is precious handwork married to real design in ready-to-wear. These are buy-now-wear-forever dresses; they should take root in one’s closet and grow in emotional value over time.
24 September 2019
Behind the scenes at Christian Dior, Maria Grazia Chiuri is doing some deep thinking about clothes—not just in regards to how they appear and what we like and dislike about them, but why. This became a subject of fascination for her after reading Bernard Rudofsky, the Austrian-American writer and contemporary of Christian Dior, who penned the 1947 essay “Are Clothes Modern?” which accompanied the MoMA exhibition of the same name. Rudofsky posited that many conventions—long considered inseparable from dress and therefore never questioned—are, in fact, useless, unbeautiful, and even harmful. He used pointy-toed shoes that misshape the foot as an example, and he designed a group of laced flat sandals as a sort of riposte. They inspired the sock shoes on Chiuri’s runway today.Woman-friendly is a somewhat pejorative term in fashion—or rather, it has been. It suggests that ease comes at the expense of beauty and allure. In some way, Chiuri set out to prop up or redeem the concept with her Fall 2019 haute couture collection.She used architecture, which was Rudofsky’s subject, as a foundation. Clothes, Chiuri suggested at a preview, are our first home: We live in them. They should be a comfort—hence those shoes. But this is the couture we’re talking about, so there was nothing meager about any of it, even if she chose to work almost exclusively in black. In fact, Chiuri could’ve done the collection all in white and the effect would’ve been nearly the same. By erasing color as a consideration, she made construction and silhouette, texture and detail her focus.Like Rudofsky, Chiuri believes in efficiency of design. She made the point with the peplos (ancient Greek for T-shirt dress) that opened the show, and the many more luxuriously simple pieces that followed, like a black chenille caftan and matching coat, and a black silk-velvet peplos. But that’s not to say she neglected Dior’s famous architecture. It’s only that her Bar silhouettes were effortless and modern, constructed without resorting to old-fashioned padding. Keeping with that notion of enchanting weightlessness, veiling became one of her primary conceits after she discovered a binder of old swatches in the house’s extensive archives. But Chiuri went far beyond head veils by Stephen Jones, styling fine mesh tops under the bodices of evening dresses and layering mesh skirts of different consistencies to create a diaphanous effect.
Her point: The body is the thing, though the results were elegant and discreet, not vulgar.Chiuri commissioned Penny Slinger, a London-born American artist of the 1960s who practiced a sort of feminist surrealism, to design the set. Slinger was more or less elided from art history books (not unlike Hilma Af Klint generations before her, who had a similar interest in goddess energy). But the spotlight has recently found Slinger; she’s the subject of a new documentary film, and an exhibition of her work recently opened in London. At Dior’s Avenue Montaigne headquarters, which will soon undergo renovations, Slinger’s photographs of the natural elements decorate the walls, and a tree of life spirals up the central staircase, which was also decorated with one of her caryatids.The caryatids of Ancient Greece and more modern Paris architecture are a perfect metaphor for this collection, functioning as they do as both decorative elements and integral structures. This was Chiuri’s most confident couture outing to date, and also her most exquisite.
1 July 2019
If some mysterious Hitchcockian secret agent were to knock on the door of Maria Grazia Chiuri’s hotel room tonight and ask, “Why did you come to Marrakech?” the first answer could be very straightforward. In 1960, Yves Saint Laurent, then the head of Christian Dior, designed a coat named for the Moroccan glamour spot. Marrakech is simply in the DNA of the house. Why not bring the Resort 2020 collection to this crossroads of the world? There was, in fact, an homage to YSL’s 1960 design in the collection shown tonight at the rain-blessed, bonfire-lit Palais Badi: a topper cut full, in textured cream silk, with an enveloping shawl collar, bracelet sleeves, and a knife-pleated skirt to match. It is exquisite, respectful, authorizing . . . but it is not Chiuri’s raison d’être. Just like in Hitchcock’s vision of Morocco, nothing is ever as it initially appears.Tonight Maria Grazia came to North Africa to show a collection about luxury, globalism, and culture. The predominant fabrics featured were toile du jouy, but a toile wholly designed and produced as a wax print in the Ivory Coast city of Abidjan by a studio/atelier named Uniwax. Uniwax makes authentic African wax prints on cotton. These are the real deal: double-faced, gloriously and intentionally imperfect, labor intensive, narrative, and expressive. A number of months ago Chiuri brought to Uniwax her toiles of seasons past—with her jungle creatures, wacky flora, and tarot card allusions—and asked the folks there to design their versions of these motifs and to print in their ideal palette (one a mix of ochre/garnet/navy/emerald, the other navy/cream).The results involve massive lions, winged mythological creatures, glowering birds, and funny references to the numbers and words associated with the tarot (10, 27,Le Monde). These substantial cotton toiles form the basis of suits and jumpsuits, empire ball gowns and capacious jackets. The shapes are largely familiar to lovers of Chiuri’s Dior—boyish outerwear with girlish frocks, anti-fit pants with crisp curvaceous jackets, and cool bowling shirts just because. The clothes are terrific—and yes, let’s wear print head to toe, why not?—but the story behind the clothes is even better. Dutch wax print is a product that has a multicultural past, involving Asia, Europe, and Africa. It is also a product that has been cheapened by crude, widely used digital imitations.
And so, in a moment of increasing cultural isolation and polarization, Chiuri is arguing against narrow-mindedness in design and production. Also, for Dior to champion authentic wax prints is to make a global statement that an African textile can embody luxury at the highest level.
29 April 2019
For her Fall 2019 show for Christian Dior, shown today in a box behind the Musée Rodin, creative director Maria Grazia Chiuri first turned the mic over, literally, to the Italian conceptual artist Tomaso Binga, a woman who, in the 1970s, signed her work pseudonymously as a man to slyly protest male privilege in the art world. Binga read a poem (in Italian) about the promise of a feminist victory over the patriarchy, while those in attendance gazed at images of a much younger, naked Binga fetchingly and discreetly conjuring the alphabet that lined the walls of the Dior box.Supposedly present in the audience was Robin Morgan, the American second-wave feminist activist and author; the title of her classic work,Sisterhood Is Global, appeared on a T-shirt in the opening look of the show (to a soundtrack by Chrissie Hynde). Chiuri has, from the outset, made feminism part of her Dior: Sometimes it has looked like a slogan or alternative logo, sometimes it has seemed borrowed from the bold “characters” who have inspired the designs, sometimes it has felt somewhat beside the point. Today, though, the rallying cry felt insistent and personal, and it was a pleasure to see a woman in power—a woman who oversees a massive worldwide business based on marketing to women’s whims and desires—make a case for feminism just because she can. It isn’t trendy, but it should be. Binga mic drop. Boom.Turning to the clothes, we also turn the clock back another 20 years. Chiuri sought inspiration for this collection from Britain’s postwar Teddy Girls, those working-class, rock ’n’ roll–loving beehived vixens who hit the clubs in a mix of men’s Edwardian jackets, full skirts, blue jeans, leather, velvet, and eyeliner galore. She was struck by the similarity in silhouette and the optimistic excess that characterized Christian Dior’s designs of the same period. She was also moved by Yves Saint Laurent’s addition to the Dior pantheon of a men’s black leather jacket for women in the late 1950s. So, heritage, hipsters, andherstory: What better place to start?Here is what you need to know: The silhouette is based on a romper. Yes, a romper. A bodysuit that might begin as a cashmere polo neck, a swirly tucked bustier, or a sassy halter will end, mid-thigh, as a comfortable boy short.
These rompers are adorable, and if your legs are worthy (or you think they are), you’ll toss on a fringed lumberjack jacket (buffalo-check with a touch of palm tree toile de Jouy, just because) in double-face cashmere and be off to that spoken-word evening to channel your non-bloated inner Kerouac. Or you’ll slip on a full skirt (possibly of translucent sequins or buoyant jacquard, or encrusted with 3-D blooms, or dry taffeta cut raw and seductively fringy at the hem), a massive belt, and a neat bar jacket, and head to the office or the opera, or just about anywhere where looking polished and original isn’t a crime.
26 February 2019
On with the shows! The metaphor of the circus has such a history in fashion—the performance, the costumes, the glitter, the constant traveling. Maria Grazia Chiuri immersed herself in research for her Spring haute couture show—circus depictions in Jean Cocteau, Pablo Picasso, Cindy Sherman, and Richard Avedon’sDovima with Elephants, which he shot in Paris’s Cirque d’Hiver circa 1955. Chiuri also came across intensely hand-sequined costumes made by Gérard Vicaire, who has recently died: “He had a workshop here in Paris. It was all hand-embroidered—it’s really couture!”You have to hand it to her. When it comes to booking acts for her shows, Chiuri is one of the sharpest-eyed impresarios in the ring. The designer, who made her entrance in ready-to-wear at Dior with herWe Should All Be Feministsslogan T-shirts, performed the breathtaking leap of inviting Mimbre, London’s all-women troupe of circus acrobats, to do their astonishing thing in the Dior big top at the Musée Rodin.Women stood on other women’s shoulders. They strode along the walkways, held high and visible from every angle, breaking gender barriers and breaking hearts with the symbolism of so much female support: She ain’t heavy—she’s my sister. . . . Chiuri is brilliant at pulling off these contemporary performance stunts: She did it by bringing in the Tel Aviv–based choreographer Sharon Eyal and members of her company for Spring 2019, and an eight-woman band of female rodeo stars from Mexico for Resort 2019. This one was the most powerfully central to her beliefs to date.The clothes in the ring can’t be the sideshow, though; this is the conundrum for all the designers who are engaged in the high-wire act of providing immersive fashion experiences today. Oddly enough, though pretty and cute, it wasn’t the glittery, fragile fantasia of girls in tiny playsuits and body stockings that stood out, nor the on-brand assortment of semitransparent caged crinoline gowns. The stars of this show were the female ringmasters: everything Chiuri had developed in black and white, from greatcoats and cutaway tailcoats, to the details of band-boy frogging, right through to a wholly tailored ivory satin three-piece suit.
21 January 2019
“She was part of an unbelievable group of artists who tried to express themselves with technique.” Maria Grazia Chiuri was referring to Sonia Delaunay, whose creative career through the early 20th century evolved from painting to textiles and even a clothing line. Her multidisciplinary approach was avant-garde at the time: art and craft coexisting through design.Among Delaunay’s vast body of work was a dress for Christian Dior worn by Françoise Hardy back when Marc Bohan was overseeing the house. Geometric in arrangement, it appears reinterpreted in Chiuri’s Pre-Fall collection, which is distinguished by its subdued yet elaborate artisanal detail.Chiuri motioned over to a mood board featuring various Delaunay references, in addition to work by Anni Albers. Both émigrés, they achieved early success alongside, but also independent of, their acclaimed artist husbands. There was also a photo of Diana Vreeland attending “The Glory of Russian Costume” exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum in 1976; images of the Ballet Russes performing Igor Stravinsky’sRite of Spring; and a version of the book cover forThe Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminineby Rozsika Parker from 1984. Like an erudite patchwork, it explained the earthy sobriety; the folk elements; and the classical dance-inspired dresses that pick up where the Spring collection left off.“I think you come to Dior to find prêt-à-porter at a high level—creativity with quality,” Chiuri noted. “All the embroideries and techniques, it can be a very experimental way to make things. And it’s not easy sometimes.” This became clear as she singled out how many of the wearable looks were imbued with layers of workmanship. First, there was a hand-application of color grazing the dark surfaces of shapely outerwear in sturdy Shetland wool—as though the classic Bar jackets had been modernized and air-brushed by street artists. (In fact, the traditional weaving technique is done by women in the Salento region of Italy.) There was delicate lace that revealed a tiling of muted tones beneath; a jacquard of tulle that appears as a gauzy lattice sheath worn by Ruth Bell; crochet intarsia and pleating formed from incrustations of gradient silk; woven tufts of fur and 3-D knits; and embroideries of velvet and beading.
If some of the silhouettes seemed noticeably throwback, they were styled in an updated way; frothy dresses worn over second-skin turtlenecks or sheer skirts revealing knee-high boots with sleek embossed accents.
13 December 2018
The invitation to the Spring 2019 show for Christian Dior read “hippodrome of Paris.” This might have seemed to hint at an evolution of the themes of the Dior Resort collection, which was shown in May at another hippodrome, that of far-flung Chantilly, and featured women horseback riders from the Mexican rodeo circuit who performed their athletic and wondrous maneuvers in a downpour with beauty and drama galore—so long, Paris Jackson! But this was not the case. Instead today’s venue was the familiar Dior black box, this one set on an inky, vast parquet floor, with a cunning use of skylights to hint at the glorious fall day happening outside, the dappled sunlight falling on the leafy far reaches of the 16th Arrondissement. Never mind: The theatrical darkness within was the setting for a conceptual dance piece, choreographed by Tel Aviv–based Sharon Eyal and performed by Eyal and eight dazzlingly dexterous and magnetic dancers from her company. More on the black box later but, as with Resort, there was a show within the show . . . and it was eye-popping and exhilarating beyond.Let’s face it, though: Modern dance of the Pina Bausch, Martha Graham, and Isadora Duncan variety is not an easy sell to a professional audience—in this instance, 2,000 onlookers—who rely on cheesy pop tunes and wicked DJ mixes to keep them perky and alert throughout the long days and nights of fashion month. Nor is it obvious catnip to the millions who follow the catwalk on social media, and who may prefer things sparkly and possibly rainbow-graced. So the starting point was a risk of sorts, even for a house that has ballet and ballet costumes in its DNA. “I wanted to speak about dance with a different point of view,” said Maria Grazia Chiuri backstage. “I think that dance and fashion are very close, for they both speak about the body.” She added, “Modern choreographers speak about freedom.”Freedom, for Chiuri, means taking a new approach to Dior’s silhouettes. Gone are the corsets to keep waists and bodices nipped and horsehair to make skirts flare. Gone too the bones and underwires and fabrics so stiff that they seem to stand up and head to the bar by themselves. Instead there is jersey in the collection for the first time, cut and draped and pleated into neat neo-Grecian frocks. A dress of macramé, elegant in khaki, was braided entirely from tulle and was soft yet precise. There are charming floral prints made abstract and artisanal through tie-dye.
And on every piece there is the sense of the hand: from butterflies created from feather and bead embroidery to Shiburi scarf prints to the way even the most minimal black tunic is cut and draped. It is a shrewd and beautiful set of clothes Chiuri has proposed for Spring, and one that ticks many of the season’s trending boxes (tie-dye, scarves, pale neutrals, acid wash, West Coast languor) without seeming calculated or forced. There are some terrific timeless buys here: mackintosh coats covered in roses or daisies and lined with the Dior logo, embroidered fatigues, plexi-heeled wedges with nude straps for that footwear holy grail . . . the naked shoe.
24 September 2018
Cast your mind back to Maria Grazia Chiuri’s debut for the house of Christian Dior, her Spring 2017 ready-to-wear collection. Stomping along the catwalk, right in the middle of an army of fencers and ballerinas, incipient feminists and would-be revolutionaries, was a black funnel-neck coat, possibly made of double-face cashmere, with a narrow rounded shoulder, no obvious hardware, and nothing to say for itself except an exquisite proportion. For some of us in attendance that day, it was the piece that spoke most confidently of Chiuri’s sartorial skills and her rightful place at the helm of a magical yet weighty legacy.Her haute couture outing for Dior today was entirely devoted to the precious dignity of such beautiful but quiet clothes, pieces sculpted and pleated and constructed (mostly sans corsets) in such a way that they could literally never exist in prêt-à-porter . . . or at least with any notion of proper fit. The palette was blush, navy, celery, rose, tea, and every interpretation of nude one might imagine. There was a deliberate dryness to the proceedings—literally, in the choice of fabrics (matte duchesse, double-face, crepe) and handwork (macramé, wood bead embroidery, ribbon embroidery), and figuratively, in the references to the atelier (the room was covered floor-to-ceiling in cotton toiles of the looks from the show) and the elevation of the client-studio relationship. These are serious clothes, Chiuri seemed to be saying, made by the finest hands and meant to be appreciated by women who are beyond the flimflam and easy glam of our times.“Couture is about something hidden,” Chiuri said. “If you go to the atelier, you want to take care of yourself and know that someone will take care of you.” Her clothes reflect a private relationship, in other words, and one set apart from the world of social media and speediness for its own sake. “We have this big opportunity to work with a different definition of time,” says Chiuri. “Craftsmanship is long; it is a dream for a future.”So what will her clients be dreaming of? Cashmere suiting of an unusual three-piece stripe: bolero, sleeveless jacket, and slim tuxedo pant. Strapless dresses that hover just over the ankle in satin, organza flowers, or a Gobelins tapestry jacquard (with “velour” of cut monkeys and stags). Sunray pleats on skirts, down backs, and framing décolletage, in luscious hues of rose and jade and sand—just loveliness in a dress, nothing else required.
And there’s a long-sleeved gown—hello demure gals!—of midnight blue and rose embroidered with glass and dull silver bugle beads that’s pure heaven. Too subtle for the red carpet? Perhaps . . .Or perhaps the red carpet is a-changin’, and therein the rationale for this client-centric, flash-defiant outing. Define it differently if you must, but there is something very timely about discreet chic at this cultural moment. This was, after all, the year of the all-black, no fuss red carpets at the Globes and Oscars, and surely we are not going to return to the multi-spangled cantilevered cleavage fests of yore anytime soon. This was also the year of a royal wedding, not to mention a royal engagement, christenings, global tours, and the breathless scrutiny of duchess style the world over. (It is a monarchic moment, at least in fashion land.) Chiuri’s offerings are for people who make noise in the world by wearing clothes that murmur elegantly. And when these clothes do speak, they do so only to their wearer. That’s true intimacy in a nutshell . . . or a dusty rose, sculpted-bodice gown with a fin of pleats down the back.
2 July 2018
Since taking the reins at Christian Dior, Maria Grazia Chiuri has sought to realign the historically male-helmed house as a bastion of feminist values and icons. She’s looking for tradition to, if not exactly bow to revolution, then at least dress the insurgents. She’s searched in history—most recently the protesting ladies of 1968—and provided sloganwear to the Instagram generation. For her Resort show, held today in the rain-soaked hippodrome of Chantilly (a town known for delicate lace and sturdy equestrians), she took inspiration from theescaramuzariders, extraordinary female rodeo riders from Mexico whom she first encountered in the photographs of Devin Doyle on this website. In fact, an eight-woman squad was flown in from Mexico and outfitted in custom Dior, and their synchronized galloping choreography opened and closed the show (serenaded by a live rock performance on electric guitars, the lead guitarist bearing an uncanny resemblance to Alessandro Michele).Speaking of uncanny: Theescaramuzariders were a perfect find for the house of Dior as their Adelita style—a nipped, peplumed jacket over a wildly voluminous skirt, a red lip, and subtle yet gleaming jewelry—was the new look of 1910–20, the years of the Mexican Revolutionary War. Theescaramuzariders also only wear garments of cotton or linen; simple, hard-wearing fabrics gussied up with fabulous embroideries and silverobjets. The effect is earthy yet fantastical.And the same can be said of many of the wonderful dresses created here by Chiuri for her customers . . . who ideally shop at a gallop, horse be damned. There are dresses of cotton lace reembroidered with yet more lace, tiny wooden beads, and tulle frills (just because). The effect is both folkloric and refined. (As for the balletic crinoline creating all that volume? Wear that as a separate dress, over a boy short and topped by a tidy unlined jacket of Japanese cotton.) The most stunning frocks are made of laces the color of tea-stained tablecloths, and one has a skirt seemingly without a seam (so you are indeed wearing the tablecloth, but one that hangs beautifully). And there is a white lace dress made of possibly four laces, long-sleeved and high-neck, that says “marry (in) me” (or “let me join the Source Family”) double-quick.There are other themes at work in this collection, though, which give the Mexican references a Gallic kick in the pants.
Polka dots and pleats, both signatures of the house of Dior, are elegant reminders of the haute couture pedigree. Toile de Jouy figures prominently in many of the looks: as a print, a jacquard, appliqué, embroidery, abstracted or painted on cotton, satin, silk, lace, even a Mackintosh. The use of toile de Jouy—in this instance a magical jungle scene—speaks to Chiuri’s love of representation, a trope of her work at Dior and previously for Valentino (with Pierpaolo Piccioli). She does not shy away from a blue giraffe or a swinging monkey. The kooky charm of these funky beasts will not be lost on actresses looking to bring dashing humor and revolutionary verve to red carpets.
25 May 2018
This May, France will mark the 50th anniversary of the Paris student protests of 1968. Maria Grazia Chiuri recently saw an exhibition about the events of that year in Rome, and she said it made her wonder what the house of Dior was doing at the time. A little digging revealed a rather fabulous discovery: a black-and-white photograph of chic young women protesting outside the Dior store because there were not enough miniskirts inside. (Hey, to each her own.) In fact, change was happening everywhere that year, including inside Dior. It was around 1968 when Marc Bohan launched Miss Dior, the house’s first ready-to-wear line; before that, Dior offered only made-to-measure haute couture clothing. “Fashion understood very well the time,” Chiuri reflected backstage.Chiuri likewise understands her own time. Dovetailing as it has with the Trump era, her Dior tenure has coincided with a great feminist uprising. She’s held up a mirror to feminism’s fourth wave, quoting the Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie one season and the art theorist Linda Nochlin in another. This season, Chiuri saved almost all the slogans for her set, which elaborately reproduced magazine covers and protest art of the late 1960s; by connecting them, she subtly hinted at their interdependence. No one—no American, at least—who walked through the doors could’ve failed to make a connection with the ongoing protests against NRA-beholden politicians in the wake of the Parkland, Florida, school shooting. That is a student-led movement, too.Chiuri took up the clothes of the late ’60s—the crochets, the embroideries, the patchworks—and filtered them through Dior’s luxury lens. The patchworks, for instance, were pieced from reproductions of archival Dior prints, and the white collars as fine as doily lace that were worn with them were leather. There were also school uniform jackets and kilts—some of the latter were reproduced in the sheer tulle that Chiuri has made a signature at Dior. The charm of the collection was in its rich craftiness. The handbags, variously embroidered and patchworked and featuring new brassCDhardware, were strong.There is no little irony in a company like Dior embracing the accoutrements of the counter-culture and the uniform of protest. What the students of 1968 were standing up against, after all, was capitalism and its compounding interests: consumerism, American imperialism, a corrupt government.
Of course, Chiuri is hardly the first designer to have been turned on by the era. If the late ’60s are an undying fashion leitmotif, it’s because few social movements since have been as impactful. Who knows, though? Considering the infinite loop of history, in 50 years’ time, the Dior designer could very well be making collections in the image of the Emma Gonzálezes of 2018.
27 February 2018
All present weirdness considered, Surrealism and the dreams of women are pretty apt territory for an haute couture collection of Spring 2018. Maria Grazia Chiuri’s feminist research instincts took her there as she read up on Leonor Fini, one of the avant-garde artists Christian Dior chose to exhibit in the gallery he was involved with before he became a couturier. What captured Chiuri’s attention, and admiration, was how Fini used clothes and extravagant headdresses to “produce” her identity. “She used her image to be regal and powerful. Surrealism speaks about dreams and the unconscious, and often about women’s bodies. It’s very close to fashion.”Surrealist symbolism—the black-and-white checkerboard runway, and the bird cages and faux plaster casts suspended over it, made the set. Stephen Jones created the delicate eye masks in homage to Peggy Guggenheim, who exhibited Fini in her 1943 show, “Exhibition of 31 Women Artists.” And so, the clothes: also mostly black and white, interspersed with sprinklings of silver and gold.In the light of the #MeToo and Time’s Up campaigns sweeping Hollywood, the sudden necessity for black awards-season eveningwear wasn’t lost on the audience. Haute couture is a practical service to women in the acting profession, as well as a conduit for high-level fantasy dressing. Potentially, that makes for a widening contradiction, a question mark over what becomes a serious woman best on the red carpet. Chiuri has clearly been thinking about that widening contradiction. “We have to think about dreaming,” she said. “In a way, it [haute couture] is our business. But if you never dream, you don’t think that something negative can change.”Her persistence in speaking as a feminist has put Christian Dior in a favorable position as far as the optics of politicized brand choices are concerned. Those who feel trouser suits are a better option for an awards appearance will be pleased. Her pants looks ranged from white ottoman bar-jacketed suits to a black tuxedo covered with a dramatic cloak at the finale. Long, black tailored coatdresses struck an alternative sober note of elegant restraint.In between, there were the many, many dresses: a particularly beautiful black halter-neck, decorated with white feathered butterflies on the front; a delicate cloudy ecru chiffon dress with long sleeves and smocking on the shoulder; a black-and-white curved optical printed gown with black gloves for shoulder straps—these stood out.
As for the woman-as-bird-cage trope, though? The reference might’ve related back to a 1930s Surrealist metaphor, but in this day and age? In the yesteryear of 2016, the framing of young actresses in transparent dresses had become almost the industry norm. Doesn’t matter if they’ve got big underwear on beneath, really. Surely, it’s just become one of the things we’re all seeing through now?
22 January 2018
Many moons ago, when Maria Grazia Chiuri’s debut at Dior included T-shirts encouraging all of us to be feminists, no one could have predicted a reckoning so profound that the impetus to show solidarity in protecting women’s rights and equality would, among other repercussions, lead to a near-total embrace of black dress at the Golden Globes.In the wake of #MeToo, and as the impact of Time’s Up continues, it’s anyone’s guess whether fashion might deliver a new prophetic statement to ripple through the zeitgeist and sell out in stores. Certainly, Chiuri is neither one to say “I told you so” nor to treat Dior as a pulpit, even if shining the spotlight on audacious women has arguably been her most consistent message so far. For Pre-Fall, she zeroed in on Claude Cahun, the pseudonym of Lucy Schwob, a prolific contributor to the Surrealist movement who was openly homosexual and who wore men’s attire more often than not. Less known today than her contemporaries—think Elsa Schiaparelli, Leonor Fini, and Meret Oppenheim—her work was wondrously transgressive. Predating Cindy Sherman by decades, she often photographed herself as myriad male archetypes, completely transforming her identity. “I think in some ways this was the birth of the modern woman,” Chiuri declared.Integral to our sit-down (the designer is recovering from an unfortunate fall at home over the holidays) was the mood board featuring Cahun’s avant-garde images, which established the link between her own menswear leanings, certain Surrealist signaling, and recognizably Dior hallmarks. Whether with a tailored hickory-striped denim jacket paired with a frothy skirt, metallic yarn updating knitwear, or a chemise with puff sleeves of delicately stitched checkerboard silk, Chiuri showed how the maison’s savoir faire could be expressed with equal parts functionality and nuance. “We have to maintain our heritage, but at the same time, transform it into something that is very easy to wear—comfortable, too,” she explained. Thus, for all the polished portrait necklines and molded shapes of jackets in heavier suiting wools, the expansive lineup was not short on all-purpose cabans, relaxed day dresses, and pants and skirts that were short enough and long enough, respectively. A leather tote boasting the French slogan of the Bureau of Surrealist Research, which translated, reads, “If you love love, you will love Surrealism,” is going to get a lot of love.
Indeed, given so much gray and black (even the Rorschach pattern, blurred animal spots, racing stripes, and painterly abstractions were rendered monochromatic), the collection risked reading as severe. Yet with our eye adjusted to #WhyWeWearBlack—and granted, black is fashion’s default color—perhaps Chiuri has once again proven her foresight. And maybe that’s why she keeps looking to the stars. See: the discovery of an archival print, all her charms, and the return of evening dresses embellished with constellation artwork from another Surrealist, Jean Cocteau. At this point, the gowns that departed from such imagery proved more interesting: specifically, one style featuring a brushed gold sequined lattice skirt, and another in blush plissé, just gauzy enough to reveal Dior gray boning. No doubt some women will be far more excited by Chiuri’s interpretations of Hedi Slimane’s Petite Taille. His men’s suiting sized for women now registers as a proper and relevant salute to all the Claude Cahuns of today.
12 January 2018
Maria Grazia Chiuri has her mind set on infusing her feminist sensibilities into the feminine house of Christian Dior. On one hand, her mission is lofty; on the other hand, it’s pragmatic and down-to-earth. Yes, women can be both! But let’s be practical: Her distinctly aged-down version of Dior ready-to-wear is not exactly “democratic”—for this is a French luxury house—but it’s ultimately intended to be accessible to millennials. There are no more flirtyjolies madamesin pastel cocktail suits and teetering stilettos parading down this runway, not even the lingering whiff of their scent. Instead, Chiuri’s girls walked in low, block-heeled Mary Janes or black mesh knee-boots which—who knows?—might have been inspired by the wrestling ring. They wore everything from ’70s patchwork jeans to leather jumpsuits, from black pantsuits to sparkly glitter mini shifts and sheer dresses (really, a lot of them) with their underwear clearly visible.But it was the shoes that really made an impact. With her background in accessories (learned long ago at Valentino), Chiuri is an expert at nailing and repeating the shape of a shoe until it becomes the one thing you look at. She is not plucking the proportions out of conceptual ether. Fact: Young girls don’t like or wear high heels. They cannot and will not walk in them. This is a socially well-observed, commercial fact of a new fashion reality, and a score for Dior.Let it be said: Every fashion brand on earth is anxiously obsessed with appealing to millennials—the M label itself irradiated with the cynical/desperate aura of a marketer’s invention. What sets Chiuri slightly apart is that she’s a woman who is more than aware that she’s also talking to the “woke” generation—to people who are the age of her own children—and she respects their minds. She leaves the door open for an educated audience. Why, for instance, was Sasha Pivovarova, the first model out—once an art student—wearing a striped marinière sweater emblazoned with the words:Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?The answer is in art historian Linda Nochlin’s seminal essay that peels back all the systemic reasons that women were excluded from the art establishment throughout history—Chuiri distributed the text at her show. Her interest in celebrating women artists is known; she gave homage to Georgia O’Keeffe in her Cruise collection.
With this collection, she’s discovered a link with the French-American artist Niki de Saint Phalle—a beautiful, rebellious, and damaged young aristocrat whose photographs are lodged in the Dior archive—because she once modeled for Marc Bohan in the early 1960s. De Saint Phalle became an artist after having a breakdown, and her Tuscan sculpture–filled Tarot Garden of bulbous, colorful, mythical female figures formed the background of the show’s set, inspired the symbols on sequined minidresses, and informed the sparkly cracked-mirror embroidery at the end of the collection. Will this learning get across? Self-evidently, customers can take it—or they could just take the Mary Janes. But in this day and age, fashion brands need to stand for something more than just nice product, and Chiuri is determined that Christian Dior puts out a positive message she really does believe in.
26 September 2017
Less than two months after staging an 85-look Resort show in the Santa Monica Mountains, in a year that’s seen her crisscross the globe—to Japan for another show, to New York for the Met Gala—Maria Grazia Chiuri was at the Hôtel des Invalides today presenting her second haute couture collection for Christian Dior. Is it any wonder that she took travel, maps, and exploration as her themes?On the 70th anniversary of the house’s founding, to be celebrated tonight with a Musée des Arts Décoratifs exhibition showcasing the work of all the house’s designers, Chiuri is speaking Christian Dior’s language. In the years following World War II, he traveled with his collections not just to California but to Tokyo, and to parts of South America, as well. In a preview at Dior headquarters, Chiuri said a 1953 illustration by Albert Decaris depicting Monsieur Dior’s trips, uncovered in the company’s new state-of-the-art archives, pointed the way this season, as did the observation, published in his autobiography, that “a complete collection should address all types of women in all countries.”Many such women were represented in the crowd this afternoon: Canadian Céline Dion, the usual Hollywood contingent, plus clients from the Middle East and Asia wearing recent season Dior,bien sûr. But aside from some embroideries and paintings of elaborate, fantastical maps, this collection was not so much international as it was cosmopolitan. And in the end, of course, being inspired by Christian Dior’s 10-year tenure, it was very, very French: not only, but predominantly Dior gray, and bearing the imprint of original pieces from his collections with an important difference—Chiuri’s muses often sported men’s brogues and lug-soled ankle boots, not the spindly Roger Vivier heels Dior’s models would’ve worn.It’s an irony that even in 2017, men’s tailoring on women signals a certain feminist bent. But irony or not, the sturdy swagger of a wrap-neck jumpsuit in wool herringbone, belted at the waist and with big functional pockets at the hips, will appeal to the same crowd that the woman-power T-shirts did at her ready-to-wear debut. In any case, it turned on this feminist. Chiuri’s reliance on heavy menswear fabrics was unusual for a modern-day couture show, even a Fall one, where a virtue is made of lightness above almost all else. Nonetheless, it’s true to the house’s heritage, says Chiuri.
“Honestly, it’s completely different to see the real archive and the image that some people have about Christian Dior. There’s so much daywear.”Still, she was savvy enough to answer every midi-length coat and chemisier dress with an ingénue frock in diaphanous chiffon or tulle. A quartet of silk velvet dresses with dramatic portrait necklines, however, provided the more striking, grown-up evening options. They looked fit for Chiuri’s lady explorer.
3 July 2017
The Cruise circuit has the fashion set circumnavigating the globe—Paris and Milan last week and Kyoto next, with New York and Florence near the end of the month. Today’s hop-off point, courtesy ofChristian Dior, was the Upper Las Virgenes Canyon Open Space Preserve in Calabasas, California, a super-remote mountaintop whereMASH, Little House on the Prairie,andGone With the Windwere filmed. Calabasas is also the town that Kanye West made fashion famous with his most recent Yeezy collection. There were no Kardashians in the crowd, but Rihanna, Charlize Theron, Solange Knowles, and Miranda Kerr all made the trek.Why California? Dior’s artistic director, Maria Grazia Chiuri, candidly admitted that the location was chosen before her arrival at the house—a production with 800 local and out-of-town guests and honest-to-goodness hot-air balloons doesn’t just come off overnight. Presented with the California location, Chiuri said she went to the archives, where she came across the house founder’s Lascaux collection of 1951, inspired by the ancient cave paintings discovered in southwestern France a decade earlier. “For me, I found it close to L.A.,” she said of Monsieur Dior’s designs. “You think L.A. and you think Hollywood, Oscars, the red carpet, but honestly I feel people love this place because you feel in contact with the natural elements.” Indeed, one local advised against straying too far from the show’s tents—there be mountain lions in the preserve. Rattlesnakes, too.Chiuri reproduced the Lascaux sketches as a silk and raffia jacquard used on New Look skirts and ponchos, as a print on a softer cotton shirtwaist dress, and as fur intarsias. The danger with such a motif is its literalness, accented here by the Dior Sauvage men’s fragrance branding on those balloons. But she conjured more than just spirit animals. Chief among her other interests this season were a Georgia O’Keeffe exhibition she saw at the Brooklyn Museum and a collaboration with Vicki Noble, the creator of the Motherpeace feminist tarot deck. From her start at Dior, Chiuri has linked magic with femininity and feminism. Here, she went direct to the source, printing T-shirts with Noble’s tarot illustrations or painting them on the back of leather Perfectos. Today’s activation had not yet begun when Chiuri announced she was dreaming about one in which Noble does tarot readings in the brand’s Paris store. That human touch is the charm of Chiuri’s Dior.
And, of course, Monsieur Dior was a lover of the tarot. As for O’Keeffe, milliner Stephen Jones’s parson’s hats were dead ringers for the topper the artist wore, and a double-face cashmere coat in black with white arabesques evoked her famous ram’s head paintings. Coats in the waisted, midi-length silhouette so associated with O’Keeffe were among the show’s subtlest and chicest pieces. Bead-embroidered easy denim looks numbered among the other highlights, along with several ethereally pretty prairie dresses.A rhapsody in blue, and nothing but blue, theFall collection Chiuri presented in Paristhis past March erred repetitive. What with the color and pattern and the spectacular sunset, tonight’s show had more verve. In an interview, Chiuri stressed the importance of forward momentum and lightness: “If you feel too much of the history, you get stuck in a box.” But that’s not her only challenge. Having left her former design partner at Valentino, she has the daunting task of remaking one of fashion’s major houses while simultaneously redefining her own USP. Is there a better place to do that than in the land of reinvention?
12 May 2017
There was an almost militaristic air; an atmosphere of girls marching to a beat atChristian Dior. They were really young-looking, too, striding out in—among other things—stiff, slouchy denim and soft, washed-out workwear. Somewhere in the long, single-file parade there was a boiler-suit; an item perhaps carrying a faded cultural trace of World War II factory worker Rosie the Riveter, merged with the ghost of a right-on 1970s first-wave feminist uniform. Adding to that, everyone was wearing black leather berets (by Stephen Jones). You get the hint:Maria Grazia Chiuriwas bringing her convictions to the runway. “I need to speak to the millennials, and understand this generation” she said at a preview. “Because I want to support them.”As is well-known by now, Chiuri included aWe Should all be Feminists–slogan T-shirt in her debut ready-to-wear collection for Christian Dior last October. Her follow-up show, post-U.S. election, didn’t have any slogans but nevertheless had an underlying commitment to making Dior more relevant as realistic streetwear young women might want to pick up. So denim was the surprise. Cut as roomy carpenter jeans and bib overalls with Christian Dior selvedge seams, those pieces had the stamp of potential cult items in the making.Still, Chiuri didn’t particularly overplay the boyishness. Her deeper overarching theme was a meditation on the color blue. She’d started in the Dior archive with a navy belted skirt suit from 1951 and gone from there. A version of it appeared in silk taffeta with a hooded top, surprisingly contemporary-looking in translation. Blue in all its nuances formed a link between her thoughts about World War II women’s uniforms, factory-worker utilitywear, the blue paintings of Picasso and Chagall, jazz blues and the spiritual meanings humanity finds in contemplating the universe. It allowed her to explore the feminine nature of Dior with a continuation of the pretty tulle bustier dresses and astrology-embroideries she'd begun with her haute couture collection, adding midnight blue velvet minidresses to the constellation of the house eveningwear.Beneath it all, though, Chiuri said her intention is to broaden the brand’s appeal and make it more inclusive of many kinds of tastes. “I want to build a wardrobe. I don’t believe in one uniform for everyone, but that everyone needs to find her own uniform, in which to express and protect herself.
” That’s a smart and honorable aim, but surely one that doesn’t need to be aimed solely at 20-somethings. Chiuri is voicing beliefs her own generation would be grateful to see manifested in a wider representation of ages on her runway; after all, in this day and age,feminist mothers and daughters march together.
3 March 2017
Haute couture’s ability to transport viewers to fantasy environments is all part of the sense of occasion needed to frame the most incredibly crafted clothes for the most incredibly wealthy. For her firstChristian Diorcouture collection,Maria Grazia Chiuritook them to a garden (albeit a fake garden) maze within a tent within the gardens of the Musée Rodin. You only had to look around to sense that this wasn’t a place of clipped topiary and raked paths, though. Hedges were overgrown, and paths strewn with leaves and moss. It was Chiuri’s way of signaling that she intends to bring some naturalism to the fantasy of couture. “I don’t want to lose the idea of dreaming,” she said, in a preview at Dior headquarters. “But I do want to make it possible for couture to be wearable.”The green labyrinth was a metaphor, she said, for her own life and career, as she finds her way anew into the workings of a storied Paris house, after her long working life at Valentino in Rome. Some of the spirit was familiar, a melding of her Italian-virginal styling with Dior-isms. Fresh-faced nymphs trod the Dior pathways in low kitten heels and boots, wearing ingenue ball gowns with wispy lingerie straps, and a vast variety of poetically playful garden-referenced headdresses by Stephen Jones.Chiuri successfully softened the corseted stricture of the Dior New Look—the daunting carapace that faces every designer at this house—by using supple fan pleating to create peplums, volumes in sleeves, and swirls in skirts. Things went in and out where they should for a house that does “feminine” waists. The ankle-grazing ballerina length of the New Look was honored, too, even if that was in wide “Tuxedo” culottes, Chiuri’s answer to masculine-feminine tailoring that opened the show.How did Dior’s first woman couturier come to these conclusions? A combination of sharp social analysis and instinct. Feeling what women want to wear is partly sisterly divination—the fact that Chiuri placed trees whose branches were hung with pagan votive offerings at the center of the set, and sprinkled sparkling tarot symbols in the layers of tulle skirts, seemed to symbolize that belief. The rest, though, isn’t magic, but understanding the occasions on which women are going to wear the clothes to be seen in. And if they don’t exist so much—well, then create the occasions!Chiuri researched this history in the Dior archives.
In the ’50s heyday of Christian Dior, there were balls that kept couture houses busy for a whole year in advance. “It was an important thing to dress for, and to sell clothes,” said Chiuri. Tonight, in Paris, she went back to the temporary Christian Dior winter gardens at the Musée Rodin to host a Bal Masqué—a competitive dress-up event for couture clients and fashion-world denizens, and in a way, a meeting of fantasy with commerce.
23 January 2017
“Paris has always been an aspirational place for people to express their creativity,” declared Maria Grazia Chiuri, whose Pre-Fall collection for Dior marks the first of many creative iterations she will present throughout a significant year in the maison’s history: its 70th anniversary. As the looks were being photographed—Ruth Bell flitting in and out of view—Dior’s first female artistic director explained that since taking the helm, she has been making closer study of her new hometown, arriving at the conclusion that it is even more diverse than people realize. “This multicultural aspect gives the city its spirit of freedom,” she added, acknowledging the waves of artists, writers, and thinkers who have found their voice in Paris after arriving as outsiders. Reimagining a bohemian impulse through the filter of Dior’s savoir-faire thus became the collection’s overarching concept. And as confirmed by a generous lineup of nearly 100 looks—edited down to the 68 selected here—Chiuri’s vision stretched far and wide.But the goal, she insisted, was focused: proposing a wardrobe that encouraged individuality. “I don’t think it’s possible today to only show one look; I think women want iconic pieces that allow them to find a look for themselves,” she said. Pointing to some of the test shots, she noted how long embroidered coats over tiered, sheer dresses; vests with velvet incrustations of hearts and diamonds; and Japanese denim with neo-folkloric metallic embroidery all contributed to an eclectic interpretation of Miss Dior. A steady push-pull of respect and disruption produced several catchy pieces, including the new bag constructed with fine saddlery craftsmanship only to be emblazoned, hip-hop style, withDiorin block typography and finished with a woven and studded strap that looked like a souvenir from a trip to Nepal.If zodiac-embroidered tops and velvet baby-doll dresses made obvious bids at millennial customers, Chiuri also showed that a young vibe can still be heritage-driven and all-inclusive. She turned the iconic house houndstooth into an unlined jacket or swingy plissé knit skirt; she revived the black tassels used in a 1947 collection to punctuate the overleaf of a black dress, making it poet’s muse material.
The question of whether any of Dior’s leading ladies will dare to wear the logo briefs—reinterpreted from last season’s straps—under their gauzy red carpet gowns isn’t the takeaway so much as the idea of this being a visible departure from Chiuri’s wholly (or is it holy?) tasteful approach at Valentino.Such an open-minded approach to chic may be a combative statement against a narrowing view of the world, a trend that looks unflattering on people and nation alike. But the assertive tone of last season’s “Dio(r)evolution” and “We should all be feminists” white tees has given way to black dresses and tops with whimsical illustrations and embroideries that evoke Jean Cocteau with messages that read, “Explore Dior in the world” and, “The future is in your hands,” which, when you stop to consider, is as individualist a declaration as any.
12 January 2017
The excitement surroundingMaria Grazia Chiuri’s debut atChristian Diorwas palpable—the first woman ever to take charge as creative director of this storied house, which for so long has stood for “femininity” in the psyche of French culture. But what does “femininity” mean in today’s world? Chiuri is a grown-up professional, who comes from long experience atValentino, and is ready to put forward her own synthesis of what modern femininity can look like. “The message, really, is that there is not one kind of woman,” she said. What emerged wasn’t a predictable chocolate-box repackaging of ladylike house codes, but a refreshingly widened viewpoint, inclusive of the sporty and the fragile. The balance between the two led to a whole series of relatable, simple, practical pieces aimed at drawing in a new audience.The opening look, worn by shaven-headed Ruth Bell in a white fencing jacket and knickerbockers, was a jolt to anyone who expected Chiuri to start on a romantic note. But as the designer sees it, the art of fencing “involves mind and heart at the same time, which women always need if they are to realize themselves.”Quilted, optic white fencing kits with buckled-on halters moved through the show, worn with a new line of sneakers and knee-length boots decorated with embroidered bees. The bee symbol holds the key to another aspect of Chiuri’s approach.Hedi Slimaneused the bee as a motif while he was atDior Homme. In the future, Chiuri plans to draw from the work of designers who’ve designed for Dior over the years. “Monsieur Dior only lives 10 years. It can’t only be about him!” she said. “In some ways, I see myself as a curator of the house.”But there were plenty of things, which were pure Maria Grazia in this collection—her talent with a lacy blouse and beautifully embroidered tulle dresses and skirts, for example. Through the lineup, the net dresses, scattered with flowers, leaves, and tiny insects, and Chiuri’s sumptuously innocent full-length dresses embroidered with tarot card imagery, were reminiscent of the work she did at Valentino. She can cut a mean piece of tailoring, too—supple double-faced iterations of the Bar jacket; a peacoat; some soberly perfect black coats.Underneath some pieces there were also faded slogan tees, one of them reading: “We should all be feminists.” Swathes of the new generation of girls and young women are just that already. Now they might have something to wear from Christian Dior, for the first time in their lives.
30 September 2016
The dramas of fashion! SinceRaf SimonsquitChristian Diorso suddenly last October, the two understudies Lucie Meier and Serge Ruffieux, who stepped up to caretake the design direction, have been managing it with unflustered aplomb. The potential for things going terribly wrong was high, but they didn’t revert to a paralyzed dullness in the face if the enormity of the task, or resort to an unhappy repetition-by-rote of what Simons had been doing. The Fall-Winter couture collection was a typical example of their non-uptight approach to producing what a youngish woman might want to buy from Christian Dior—a feminine but, thankfully, not jolie madame collection in black and white.Inevitably, it was loosely based on the silhouette of Christian Dior’s 1947 New Look Bar jacket and crinolined skirt, but without anachronistic corseting or frothy tulle petticoats. Instead, the impression was of relaxed black taffeta dresses, a concentration on full skirts, tops flowing out to traily trains, and smatterings of gold and silver embroidery. The official line was that the collection was meant to emphasize the work of the Dior ateliers—the part of the house that provides the continuity of skills crucial to a couture house, no matter which designers are coming and going. To tell the truth, this season didn’t showcase their abilities particularly well, as the unfitted nature of the collection and the flat Roman sandals made the whole seem more like clothes a young girl would take off on holiday than grand occasion-wear. That, of course, is understandable when the designers in charge presumably have little experience of the worlds that wealthy clients actually inhabit. To take the possibilities of haute couture to truly soaring heights requires the insights of someone who knows both the techniques and the lifestyles inside out. Dior is apparently about to announce the appointment of such a person. More drama will inevitably ensue. But before the interregnum of Meier and Ruffieux ends, it behooves the wider industry to acknowledge that this pair of Swiss nationals, thrown together in the Sturm und Drang of a house emergency, managed this difficult moment well.
4 July 2016
How many terms do the English have for rain? A few of the quainter ones were being trotted out by the natives who had boarded “The Dior Express” as it chugged through the Oxfordshire countryside, bound for Blenheim Palace this afternoon. It was bucketing down, pelting, chucking it down, raining cats and dogs—doing everything in its power, in fact, to rain on the grand, sweeping country house location of Dior’s Resort show.Visitors can’t have been all that surprised—English summer and downpours are a national cliché, after all, but though all hopes of glorious walks in the formal gardens and sightseeing in the parkland of the Duke of Marlborough’s estate were dashed well before the train left Victoria station, the show, thankfully, wasn’t a complete washout.As a brand,Christian Diordepends more religiously than others on the narrative of its past, and it does have a history with Blenheim. Two charity Christian Dior shows were held in the ’50s in the vast, golden-hued country house built by the architect Sir John Vanbrugh as a gift to John Churchill, the 1st Duke of Marlborough, in the early 18th century. They were haute couture shows, both held in the presence of Princess Margaret, the Queen’s naughtier and more fashionable sister, who was a Dior customer. The first, in 1954, was designed by Christian Dior, the second, in 1958, byYves Saint Laurent, who took over immediately after his death. The third, in 2016, was designed by Lucie Meier and Serge Ruffieux. Only, of course, theirs wasn’t a couture collection but a Resort show—the interim season that has somehow become the mega-competition ground between the fashion power brands that are now engaged in a new war of location one-upmanship.Make no mistake: The lofty library at Blenheim is prettyupas a backdrop—especially for a house everyone knows will soon pass into the hands of a new designer, as yet to be announced. As a place-holding collection, it didn’t attempt to match the grandeur of the surroundings, but worked more in the idiom of slightly quirky young daywear—a bit of this, a bit of that—which is vaguely coalescing into a thing. There were puffed sleeves, asymmetrical drawstrings, cropped leather pants with piecrust flares, striped shirting panels, scarf-like streamers flowing from wrists, and chunky gilded deco heels—styling that at times calledJ.W.Anderson’s methods to mind.
The designers dutifully sent out a few routine versions of the coatdresses Dior is known for, and a couple of distinctly odd tripartite silhouettes with either a very large belt or a very short skirt layered with a sweater and a longer skirt. Still, there were two lovely floral-print tea dresses here, too, straightforwardly pretty, easy things that will doubtless sell well.
31 May 2016
There was a mirrored set reflecting infinity at theChristian Diorshow, and a voice intoning “Time, time, time” on the soundtrack. What did it signify—the past on the left, the endless permanence of the brand’s future on the right? Or, more pertinently, that the collection passing through is but another soon-to-be-forgotten fleeting moment in Dior’s history? As everyone knows, the task of keeping Dior warm between theexit of Raf Simonsand the hiring of a new creative director has been undertaken by the brand’s studio team.Within those parameters, studio heads Lucie Meier and Serge Ruffieux did quite a decent placeholder job, which skewed rather refreshingly younger and less uptight than before. There was a lot of black suiting, with slit, high-waisted pencil skirts and softer jackets worn as a young girl might, with pointy silver and black low Mary Janes. With their hair tightly coiled into buns and ears studded with safety pins and other jingle-jangles, the models walked easily and briskly, many in coats with deep flounces in the hem. There were also cocktail dresses with swathed necklines, scattered with random, vintage-y settings of colored gems.Truth be told, after that, a meandering feeling took over—the coats kept coming back, the suits and dresses kept reappearing, and there was never much sense of a finale. Still, it wouldn’t be fair to dismiss this joint effort without mentioning one surprise—the Dior knits. Somebody on the team had come up with some interesting, fashion-forward shapes—one with a strong black flounce running into a V and a high neckline, another in shocking orange with leg-of-mutton sleeves, and a couple of others with paisley patterns. Next season will probably be another story, once a new creative director is found, but those who’ve been holding the fort sinceRaf Simonsquit have not disgraced the house.
4 March 2016
Everything was as usual at theChristian DiorHaute Couture show: the same venue, the sense of occasion that this storied house of fashion commands. The only difference, as the world well knows, is that it is currently operating without a creative director. Instead, it was a young team, which looked to be in their 20s and 30s, that ran out to take their bows at the end of the show. Collectives are very à la mode in Paris now (the friends behindVetementsbeing the prime example), but it’s fair to say that six months ago, this crew never imagined they’d be out front, taking the credit for a grand show in a vast mirrored marquee in the gardens of the Musée Rodin. Nor did Dior’s management, which is now dealing with the interim between the surprise resignations ofRaf Simonsand Pieter Mulier, who was the creative director’s full-time number two in-house.A Dior press representative names Lucie Meier and Serge Ruffieux as the heads of studio who stepped up to fill the void. They were smiling as they made a brief appearance before running off, and they deserved to feel happy with the job they’d done—primarily of continuing the feeling that Dior has to belong to a younger, modern world. Simons began that mission, of course. In the hands of a more junior group, it became softer, more casual than their former boss’s theoretical approach—a sensibility patchworked through a visual prism belonging to people who’ve grown up withPrada,Marni,Céline, andMarc Jacobs.That’s not to say that they disrespected Dior house codes. While dispensing with corseted structure, they honored waist emphasis with fit-and-flare silhouettes, short sparkly dresses, and a couple of plain bell-shaped evening midis with asymmetric necklines fastened with bows in the back. The white “Bar” jacket, with narrow sleeves, flounced cuffs, and a sprinkling of jeweled lilies of the valley, worn over a black pencil skirt, slit at one side and fanning out as the model walked, read as the nearest thing to “couture” this collection attained.What it skipped was a sense of grandeur or build-up. There was no ball gown finale to answer the hanging question as to whatJennifer Lawrencemight wear to theAcademy Awards—though that’s usually arranged as a bespoke off-runway matter anyway. The bigger question is who will be brought in to take over the direction of this house. There is talent in the ranks of Dior, and it may be that, long-term, this baptism of fire will produce stars.
Shorter term, the fashion world waits to find out who will become Dior’s next visionary leader.
25 January 2016
IfRaf Simons’s departurefromDiorin October charted high on the industry’s Richter scale of shake-ups, there’s been next-to-no rumbling from themaisonsince. As such, the Pre-Fall offering qualifies as news (we’ll take what we can get). Created internally, the collection came unaccompanied: no front person, no point of departure, no theme or particular mood. But that doesn’t mean it lacked interest.Arguably, there was considerable appeal to such an anticlimactic effort; it’s not every day that you find a mink coat treated with real gold worn beneath an army green trapeze coat. This tendency to double up while playing down provided a clever way to emphasize precision of proportion, and to communicate style over fashion. In a sense, the collection seemed to fetishize the mythic Dior codes less than ever, instead planting certain details—be it a tulip silhouette on a parka or a bejeweled bee on a shirt collar—to ensure that nothing felt ordinary. Jackets featuring dropped-waist basques, pants finished with broderie anglaise, wisps of lace enhancing the femininity of leather, and oversize mother-of-pearl buttons proposed novelty without risk. Notably, the strongest evening option asserted its allure from behind.Regardless of the situation behind the scenes, the overall statement benefited from a particular sangfroid, the Parisian equivalent of “keep calm and carry on.” Still, for no other reason than the coats—all of them, really—the collection registers well.
19 January 2016
There were mountains of delphiniums shipped in to decorate the Dior tent and mountains of people clogging the Rue de Rivoli entrance, jostling for a glimpse ofRihanna. Inside, though? There wasRaf Simonsbackstage, talking about keeping things simple and quiet: "It’s a calm one, and very soft—away from the overdone. I didn’t want to embellish. So I was thinking about the South of France—rainbows and the simple things. And there’s a bit of Victoriana: something of that filmPicnic at Hanging Rock. With a slight sexual undertone of darkness.”Simons can lay reasonable claim to have been the one to start both the current Victoriana-nightdress trendandthe intergalactic astronaut trends that are running through so many collections this season—he proposed both themes in his Spring 2015 ready-to-wear show. But part of the responsibility for helming a behemoth brand like Christian Dior is filling stores with daywear for women who like feminine things rather than conceptual clothes, and this season he attended to servicing it.His solution was to pair scallop-edged handkerchief cotton dresses, little shorts, and bodices with black tailoring. The jackets—softened from the corseted New Look hourglass—skimmed the body and broke into bands of micro pleats at the hem, a masculine-feminine merge suggesting the techniques that went into the trains of Victorian and Edwardian dresses. The sexual undertone? Not so much in the clothes as at the necks, which were bound with tight scarves and chokers, each carrying a single jewel and dangling a metal tag, some of which read1947, the date of Dior’s revolutionary New Look collection. In terms of fashion, though, there was nothing very disturbing or challenging in any of this. Deliberately so: In a season where many collections have apparently neglected to remember that there might be warm weather in 2016, Dior is one place where fresh summer options will be found.
2 October 2015
Raf Simons described the stunning set for Dior's Couture show today as part church, part garden, part nightclub in Ibiza. The pointillist-painted panels could have been stained-glass windows—or flowers. The purple grass carpet worked perfectly well as an acid hallucination at a festival. In fact, a hallucinatory quality penetrated the entire presentation. "Dior is always a fairy tale, no matter what I'm doing," Simons said with a knowing laugh, but today's show had a special through-the-looking-glass magic. It was those sleeves that did it.The sleeve was a point of particular obsession for Cristóbal Balenciaga, the master of them all. Looking at Simons' sleeve treatments, it was easy to see why these dangly appurtenances to a human form should become the focal point for fashion's finest minds. The opportunity a sleeve offers to deconstruct and build anew is unparalleled. And that was on Simons' mind. "Fighting out of Dior's DNA," he called it. "We wanted to deconstruct such a loaded heritage, specifically in the coats."The coats! Simons' injection of his own cultural heritage into Dior's mainline referred back to the Flemish masters and the sculptural drape, the velvety weight that men like Vermeer were able to communicate in paint, their models serenely poised with arms folded. Simons claimed his design process began with a basic square blanket, into which a hole was cut and a sleeve attached. The result was a coat/cape hybrid that yielded a result as spectacular as a swingy black cashmere trapeze with a single sleeve of lustrous sable extending from one side. There was substance, but there was movement. The contrast of lightness and weight was at the very core of the collection.Dior'sfemmes fleurs, his flowers, have been a guiding light for Simons in his time at the house. But he found a new garden this time: Flemish painter Hieronymus Bosch's fantasticalGarden of Earthly Delights, with its ultimate contrast between Adam and Eve's Paradise and the Purgatory into which they were cast when they disobeyed God. Today's purple catwalk was studded with huge lumpen objects that Simons imagined as forbidden fruit. The weight of his outerwear was balanced by ethereal dresses composed of cut feathers or rippling pleats. There was a monastic purity in white chiffon and triple organza Guinevere dresses, and velvet coats clutched demurely (echoing Simons' last collection for Jil Sander).
But then there was an abstract chain mail layered over that purity, and the deep slits in coats and dresses (two were even entirely open at the side) translated into a deeply sexual physicality, striking from a designer who was once considered a master of rigorous understatement.It was telling that Simons was fascinated by Dior's profligacy with his New Look. "Coming out of the austerity of the Second World War, Dior was inspired by something he wasn't supposed to be inspired by," he said. "Glamour, excess, too much." Seventy years later, Raf Simons is coming to the same primal realization: forbidden fruit tastes sweetest.
6 July 2015
Le Palais Bulles is just that—a palace of terra-cotta bubbles set into a cliffside halfway between Cannes and Monaco. It's one of the goofiest buildings you'll ever see, like a condo fromThe Flintstonesor a pile of Murakami eyeballs. Now the property of the legendary Pierre Cardin, it was the location for Dior's Cruise presentation tonight, with Cardin, 92 years old, in the front row. And the atmosphere the house loaned to the evening was utterly appropriate. "Playful, sweet…childish, almost," said Raf Simons, as he reflected on a venue he fell in love with five years ago, when he was first brought here. "The house is big but intimate, and it doesn't behave like an authority," he continued. "And Dior can do that sometimes, especially if you look at it from an architectural point of view."Check Simons' trajectory at the house and you might think he's been subtly subverting Dior's authority, twisting it to his own ends, imposing his own personality. The iconic Bar jacket, for instance, has been backseated. Which made tonight's show something of a surprise. The Bar silhouette was back, full-sleeved, nip-waisted. "I will always go back," Simons insisted. "I don't think that by going back I make it less mine." And, yes, he did it his way, pairing that distinctive shape with taffeta shorts, or defusing the formality of a black Bar pantsuit with a pair of flip-flops. The Dior heritage was evoked throughout the show—the low-heeled, pointed shoes quoted Roger Vivier's footwear, but, as Simons said, they were as much Siouxsie Sioux as Marie Antoinette. Dior's classic femme fleur was abstracted in shimmering, crystal-strewn florals or, most spectacularly, in the net overdresses that restrained pleated underskirts. That was Simons' artful way of addressing what he saw as the physically uncomfortable restriction of Dior's original dresses. Here, there was shape, but there was also ease.Antti Lovag, who designed the Palais Bulles, considered himself an anti-architect. "The straight line is an aggression against nature," he once wrote, a sentiment that put him on a collision course with modern architecture's Corbusier-influenced orthodoxy. He intended his work for"joueurs et aventuriers,"players and adventurers. Without wanting to make a meal of a metaphor, Lovag's Palais Bulles spoke volumes about where Simons sits with Dior right now. The playfulness of the collection, with its abbreviated proportions and knit onesies, broadcast his confidence.
The patchworking and crochet and mineral-like strata of Lurex added a thoroughly winning organic edge.Simons talked about the presence of nature in the south of France, the huge sky, the big, brutal coastline that was such a turn-on for Picasso and Matisse, so far removed from the precise sobriety of his hometown, Antwerp. "Here, you look at the world differently," he explained. "You look up, up at the sky." And, as if to vindicate everything he'd said and presented, Dior punctuated the postshow drinks with a fireworks display as cloud-bustingly, heaven-rattingly grand as anything you've ever seen. From the terrace of the Palais Bulles, the magic looked like the very least you could expect from this place and this time.
11 May 2015
Throbbing Gristle's "Hot on the Heels of Love," the piece of music that soundtracked the Christian Dior show today, has a chilly, slaphappyFifty Shadesquality that seemed tailor-made for a collection whose animal essence was fulsomely described by Raf Simons as "something more liberated, darker, more sexual." Something more than Dior'sfemme fleur, in other words.But it was also more commercial than anything Simons has offered before, in any of his guises. And saying that is no insult, because it underscores the confidence the designer has acquired in his time at Dior. He could backseat those curvaceous Bar-shaped classics in favor of man-tailored tweed pantsuits—double-breasted jackets and cropped, cuffed pants—and liquid mesh pieces that second-skinned the body. There was a nod to heritage in animal prints—Christian Dior introduced leopard print in 1947—but Simons' homage was a blown-out reinterpretation that was so abstract as to look psychedelic…or maybe embryonic, emblematic of new life in the jacquard of a body stocking that Simons carried over from Couture.That actually seemed like an apt metaphor for the whole collection. Simons talked about "a new kind of camouflage," but what was it that was truly hidden here? Sex, of course. Sublimated under big, desirable tweed coats, in abbreviated coatdresses paired with thigh-high vinyl boots (go there!), in shifts collaged from fox with a tinge of unnatural nature. There was elegance and there was oddity in this collection—exactly what you'd expect from Raf Simons. But salability? Ah, yes,thatwas the news.
6 March 2015
Raf Simons has always been open about his inspirations. Often, it's been a case of wearing his heart on his sleeve, all but literally, which has given his work an extraordinary amount of soulfulness. That's appropriate, given that music is his master. Simons' Couture show for Dior today was permeated with his respect for David Bowie. "He's a chameleon, able to reinvent himself," Simons enthused. "But he's also the materialization of something else. More than a man—anidea." Much like Mr. Dior, in fact. The name "Dior" has come to represent so much more than Christian himself, and it's now fallen to Simons to winkle out all thatmeaning.For Simons, it unfortunately still means something a little too "lady" for his tastes. He's resolute about changing that perception. He is keen to create connections for couture that wire it to the wider world. That was all over today's show, from the materials used to the graphic silhouettes to a color scheme thatkicked. Bowie used to call himself a medium. Simons is cut from the same cloth. The collection he showed was a stunning multilayered effort that spanned time and space, imagining the future as seen by the past, reimagining the past with the hindsight of the future, all set to a soundtrack of songs spanning key years in the career of a performer who has always done exactly that with his music. The conceit was simple in essence—Simons and Bowie giving each other a little soul love—but devastatingly sophisticated in its execution.Take one ingredient—maybe the unlikeliest—of this couture confection: plastic. The first look was a sequined guipure lace shift topped with an opera coat in a green floral-printed plastic, anchored with vinyl thigh boots. Thesecondlook featured the same boots, same coat, this time in black, with the dress encrusted with embroidery. The romance of couture salons in the ’50s, the strung-out experimentalism of the ’60s, the anything-goes-ness of the ’70s…Simons rolled the universe into a ball wrapped in plastic. It's a hard task to pick highlights from what followed. Minutely pleated flaring dresses and skirts embroidered in strips of ribbon had an ineffable, irresistible lightness. A tiny sequined shift topped by a floor-length coat made Edie Sedgwick new again. (She's one fashion icon who will never fade away, but a little freshening up never hurt.) And the things that were done to guipure lace in the name of haute couture were the stuff of a beauty obsessive's dreams.
After the show, Simons was musing on his road tohere. "My first Couture shows were exercises in understanding the history. The more you understand, the more you see what it can become." There were none of the Bar silhouettes that are Dior's genetic building blocks, but there were plenty of another kind of building block: bodysuits, in jacquard knit or tattoo-embroidered silk. They'll probably be the most divisive element in the collection, but they illuminated its most significant aspect. Simons claimed Dior for himself today. If he appreciates David Bowie's chameleon quality, he proved that he is just as capable of reinventing himself. In a mirrored venue that was deliberately designed to stretch space outward and upward, Raf Simons took us on a trip—and tiny minds were blown.
26 January 2015
The house of Dior has a long history with Japan. In the early '50s Christian Dior designed a series of looks in fabrics from Kyoto's famous Tatsumura workshop. Around the same time, the Tokyo department store Daimaru began selling his haute couture. Later, Dior was commissioned to design three dresses for the civil portion of Princess Michiko's wedding ceremony. But the designer's fascination with the country began earlier than that. In his autobiography, he recalled his childhood obsession with the Japanese screens in his Granville home, likening them to his "Sistine Chapel."The country looms large in the imagination of today's Dior creative director Raf Simons, as well. The Japanese were the first customers for his signature menswear line in the '90s, and he came to Tokyo as often as twice a year. "It's a sublime city to be in," he said. "From a fashion point of view, they take so much liberty to express themselves."Tonight, the house staged its first-ever show for Pre-Fall before a crowd of 1,400 that included Audrey Tautou and Hailee Steinfeld. The location was Tokyo's Kokugikan, one of the country's pre-eminent sumo wrestling arenas. Last June, Simons presented Dior's Resort offering in New York—Brooklyn, to be precise. The two addresses are a road map to the brand's expansion plans. "Why Tokyo? We think Japan is a key country for luxury and fashion," said Sidney Toledano, Dior CEO. "We just renewed our store in Omotesando, and we have many flagship stores here." The snaking line of young people who queued up to get into the after-party offered a glimpse of the city's enthusiasm for the brand.But this was not a "Japanese" show. There were no kimonos, no obis. Simons already did his "continent collection" for Fall '13 Haute Couture. Here, with fake snow falling from the rafters andBlade Runner's Harrison Ford and Sean Young talking replicants on the soundtrack, the designer set about expanding the Dior vocabulary. Specifically, he went beyond the special-occasion clothes—the cocktail dresses, the red-carpet gowns—the house has been synonymous with. "I tried to imagine a woman who was very much into the language of Dior," Simons said, "but she also has her garden, and she has her boyfriend with a motorcycle in the city, or she's with her kids by the sea, or out with her dogs.
" There were waxed-cotton storm coats; knit vests worn with sturdy, wide-legged trousers; mid-calf shift dresses just shy of sensible; and, in a small nod toward Japanese youth culture, short plaid dresses worn with flat boots. If all that sounds slightly unglamorous, it wasn't for a second.The other side of the story was told by the second-skin sequin turtlenecks that Simons layered with most of the looks, giving the show a sensual, futuristic edge. Sure to be the season's hands-down must-haves (high street will try to knock off these babies in no time), they peeked out from the neckline of Bar coats and sleeveless Bar dresses, showed up with long fur vests with a 1960s zing, and eventually inspired the show's best pieces: Fair Isle sweaters and sweaterdresses rendered entirely in paillettes. Platform boots, fistfuls of rings, and Princess Leia braids finished off the look.Once the photographers in the camera pit got their shot, the models zigzagged around the Kokugikan's enormous squaredohyo. The Shibuya scramble came to mind. Simons isn't alone in his new interest in utility—"clothes for real life" has become fashion's meme of the moment—but he did a bang-up job of it.
11 December 2014
In the venue for the Dior show today, one of the most extraordinary feats in recent fashion history took place. In the Louvre's Cour Carrée, the ancient heart of an ancient palace, a mirrored tent was erected, perfectly rendering its environment in such a way that the tent was invisible. It was like the present had ceased to exist. An appropriate cue for the collection that Raf Simons showed, in which the 18th century and the 22nd century knocked boots, bypassing everything in between. The effect was compounded by the futuristic whooshing on the soundtrack and the "Beam me up, Scotty" set. We were in that bedroom at the end of the world in2001: A Space Odyssey. Here was new life, fashion's Star Child, waiting to be born.Simons liked what he did in July's Couture so much that he wanted to extend the experiment into ready-to-wear. Finding the future in the far past—it's a challenge that would engage an artist in any arena. But addressing that challenge in everyday clothes produced a new poetry. It didn't always work—the sprigged florals and the chintz were too stuffy—but the white cotton smocks touched with broderie anglaise were like bed shirts in some highwayman's fantasy, a wicked combination of the virginal and the salacious. And the way the clinical white futurism of the first looks was infected with floral jacquard broughtwasandwill betogether with subtle precision.Simons made his point much more boldly when color was involved, from the pale pink of a shapely linen coat (the highwayman came to mind again) to the orange satin linen gilet that closed the show. It referenced an 18th-century court coat, which evoked the historicism of Christian Dior's original Bar silhouette. Fashion present floats on an ocean of fashion past; Simons simply chose to ride the time machine a little further back. But he paired his gilet with Bermuda shorts. It was a look you could imagine piquing the interest of the women he's drawn to Dior. A judicious blend of fantasy and reality—the Apple Watch of fashion.
26 September 2014
Raf Simons is not a designer obsessed with the past. He leaves the decade-hopping to his peers, preferring instead to look ahead. And yet his latest Couture collection for Dior—his most completely realized to date, as beautiful as his debut of two years ago, if not as audacious as his continent-spanning collection from last July—found him looking back. Not at one specific era, but rather at many. Simons was curious, the program notes explained, about the way different time periods informed and influenced subsequent ones. And more than that, he said afterward, he found himself thinking about Christian Dior's fascination with the Belle Époque and asking himself, "If I had been [working] at that time, what would be my interest, conceptually or technically or architecturally? What would I be excited about?"The show was divided into eight groups, hopping not decades but centuries—for example, from the Marie Antoinette-inspired pannier silhouettes of the opening to astronauts' jumpsuits, back to embroidered court jackets and forward again to twenties volumes. Models from each grouping emerged onto the circular set, a launching pad like something out of a sci-fi flick, with curved walls covered in orchids by the thousands. They circulated there to the sounds of Sonic Youth, exposing the clothes from all angles and letting the intricacies and, at other times, the purity of the construction sink in.Simons' real feat was just how modern it all looked despite its historicism. He achieved that through lightness. You got the sense that the silk jacquard 18th-century dresses were every bit as weightless as the parachute-fabric flight suits. There was relatively little embellishment on those dresses; the sumptuous, shimmery materials and the voluptuous forms were the story. His flapperish dresses, meanwhile, were dripping not in heavy beads but in high-tech resin fringe.The other thing that keeps Simons out ahead is his assertion that Couture need not be for special occasions. True luxury is spending five or six figures and wearing something not once or twice, but incorporating it into your daily wardrobe. Sweeping, long-line coats (Edwardian) and the familiar bar jacket (1950s), made unfamiliar with exaggerated shawl collars, will prove tempting to clients. Exquisitely detailed court coats and court jackets (in wool, velvet, even astrakhan) were equally believable as everyday wear, paired with classic knits and trousers.
If the finale dresses—outwardly simple, though, in fact, rather complex—didn't quite take off, it was only because of the power of what came before.
6 July 2014
Dior in Brooklyn. Who would've ever imagined those two proper nouns together in a single sentence? Alexander Wang broke the outer-borough barrier back in February when he showed at the Navy Yard's Duggal Greenhouse. But Dior, the storied French house and LVMH bigwig Bernard Arnault's baby? It happened tonight, and the likes of Rihanna, Marion Cotillard, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Leelee Sobieski, Allison Williams, Margot Robbie, the artist Sterling Ruby, and designers including Christian Louboutin and Proenza Schouler's Lazaro Hernandez and Jack McCollough arrived by water taxi and town car to witness fashion history in the making. Bureau Betak spent nearly a week constructing an elevated floor at Duggal that situated the show's 1,000-plus guests at window level. The Manhattan views vied for attention with the LED light display at the opposite end of the warehouse space.Neither could compete with the clothes. This was another lively, smart, lovely collection from artistic director Raf Simons, one that married the practical realism the designer says he sees among his new American clients (he's been at Dior only two years) and typical French chic. Simons took up the silk scarf—le carré, as they say in Paris—as the show's leitmotif. It meant that these clothes were more fluid than the sculpted and molded silhouettes of some of his previous collections for Dior. Softer and breezier but without sacrificing the clean, modern look that is so identifiably Simons, or skimping on the wearability factor. Despite the show's laser focus, Simons had propositions for all occasions.The feminine silhouette was ultra-high-waisted with long, lean trousers and flaring, knee-length skirts (including at least one in sheared fur) scraping the rib cage. On top there were torso-limning, backless silk camisoles in graphic, abstract prints or draped and layered tops with a boxy, geometric fit. Simons explained he found some of the prints in the house archives; others were created for the show. "I wanted to explore print without being too romantic about it," he said. "I was surprised by how raw and artistic some of the archival scarves were." You'd never call the prints and patterns in tonight's show dainty, not when they were boldly juxtaposed three against each other, as in the case of a cocktail dress that combined multicolor sequins with embroidered flowers with chevroned stripes.
Simons' January couture sneaker evolved here into a sport sandal with scarf straps; it gave printed tunics and long silk evening skirts a fresh, zippy attitude.There were sixty-six looks in the collection. When Dior president and CEO Sidney Toledano made notice of that fact before the show, he told Simons, "Did you know? This is the sixty-sixth year that Dior Inc. U.S.A. exists." A total coincidence, Simons asserted, but one that had a special meaning for him. "Christian Dior was a bit superstitious, and I am too." And, more important, "There was always a strong relationship between Mr. Dior and U.S. clients. It makes sense for us to come here now."
7 May 2014
Raf Simons radicalized menswear physicallyandphilosophically, which is why the fact that he is now helming Dior still has such a pinch-me potency. The possibilities inherent in the tie-up are enough to make the senses swim.Today, sight was the first sense to feel the power of possibility. The enveloping, surreal floral bower that was last spring's set had been replaced by an industrial simulacrum, flowers of light radiating in a spectrum that turned red into searing orange (Grace Coddington's hair was a flaring corona) and blue into bright turquoise. Then the light turned white, and hearing, the second sense, surrendered to the martial techno pulse of French Fries' "Bug Noticed"…It's impossible for Simons to design anything that doesn't come straight from the heart. So it's fair to compare Dior's rejuvenation under his watch to a heart transplant. The personality of the collection Simons showed this afternoon was the clearest consolidation yet of his transformative impact. One favorite instance: a Bar jacket whose emblematic flaring hip looked like it had been let down gently.When he came to Dior, Simons talked a lot about his fascination with the secret codes of couture and women's clothing. In his own collections, he has always been equally entranced by their male equivalents. The two currents ran together today: Tailored coats and jackets in flannel, camel, and pinstripe had a masculine weight, but they were matched with intensely feminine colors and silks. Many of them featured the purely female detail of corset lacing, down the sides or the spine or, sensationally, across the Bar-silhouetted hip of a slipdress in khaki, which made Grace Mahary look like a nouvelle Maggie the Cat. But, claimed Simons, these were also suggestive of the laces of trainers, which he snuck into his Haute Couture show in January to such great effect, like a jolt of reality. Transmogrified into heels, they had a slightly more surreal effect today.But that is, of course, because "reality" offers infinite possibilities. Simons elaborated on this some more when he closed the show with eveningwear that layered sheer, elongated, embroidered T-shirts over shorter, knitted versions of same. The simplicity of the proposition scarcely compromised its strength.
27 February 2014
Raf Simons has always been mesmerized by closed, secret worlds. At his own label, it was the youth tribes who coalesce around certain types of music. Since he started designing womenswear, other doors have opened for him. The beauty parlor/spa scenario of his Spring 2012 collection for Jil Sander was the most obvious expression of his wonderment at the world of women and the closed societies they create for themselves. Then came the job at Dior, and, with it, the opportunity to truly decipher the codes of haute couture and its sorority of female artisans: These are clothes that women make, by hand, for other women.Simons is like a kid in a candy store with couture. Its combination of technique and psychology could have been tailor-made to satisfy his obsessions. So the first thing that struck one about today's show was the lightness, not only in the openness and airiness of the clothes themselves, but also in an attitude that reflected the designer's oft-stated desire to modernize couture. And if that boiled down to something as straightforward as pairing a couture dress with flower-strewn trainers (Simons painted a picture of a woman leaving the red carpet, plucking her shoes out of her bag, and spending the rest of the night in a club), then so be it. "Dior loved movement in his clothes," said Simons, "and I was wondering what would have happened if he'd been in business twenty or thirty years longer, when the sixties happened, when there was aliteralmovement in society." Wonder no more…the collection that Simons showed today had the free spirit that you imagined he imagined Dior would have brought to couture.The key to the code was the cutwork. Outfit after outfit was slashed or winkled open to form a lattice that veiled the female form below. Then there were actual overlays, and veils of sheer silk covering polka-dot sheaths. Everything shook or shimmied: "It's not about stillness, not about the couture pose," said Simons. It was also quite sexual, as concealment infused with the peekaboo promise of revelation often is. The sole jewelry was a tiny chain that wrapped the neck and the fingers in a tiny bow. It was another way for Simons to communicate the chargedintimacyof couture.The show was a celebration of the hand—with the clothes, obviously, but also with a set that had been laboriously hand-plastered in swooping curves and columns, a bit like Bedrock carved out of lard.
The result was an all-white, womblike space, inspired by the work of Valentine Schlegel, a little-known ceramist from the fifties who graduated to making "architectural suggestions" with biomorphic plaster jobs. To Simons, the interior represented "a radical, female gesture." That choice of words alone in the context of couture underscores how this man is the standard-bearer of a transformative sensibility.And the fact that he is able to imbue his mission with the sweetness and light we saw in todays presentation makes it that more remarkable. For all the lip service that designers pay women, Simons is one who is truly dedicated to respect and celebration. A jacquard top (intended to convey the ease of a T-shirt) featured a graphic that wasn't quite clear from the audience. "It's a woman, on top of the world," the designer explained.
19 January 2014
It feels like it's taken no time at all for Raf Simons to apply his own thumbprint to Dior. The latest proof arrived with a Pre-Fall collection that spoke the Dior language with a very convincing Belgian inflection. The loveliest example was the eveningwear, where, applying himself to the challenge of doing somethingnewon a road so well-traveled, Simons wentclassic—as classic as a T-shirt, which in this context naturally read a little bit radical. That's the essence of Raf Simons: the search for new meanings in a recontextualization of the familiar. It's a quest that is working odd, exciting wonders at Dior. What would a classic army green, orange-lined MA jacket look like if it was extended with the addition of a flaring skirt? Well,thisis what it looks like.TheT-shirt-ness of the eveningwear was most obvious in the graphic panels, like decals, on the front of a tank dress or a trapeze top. There were jacquards of flowers floating above minutely detailed landscapes: a Belgian beach with a bicycle in the distance, a Dutch tulip field with a traditional windmill and a wind turbine bracketing the horizon, both so tiny as to be almost invisible… "About infiniteness," Simons offered cryptically. About a haunting beauty, too.On more familiar ground, the Bar jacket, Dior's tent pole, reappeared in a newly soft, unstructured version, with an optical silhouette that created the illusion of a smaller waist and emphasized hips. Simons revealed an unexpectedly deft approach to old-school glamour with a red mink coat and—a first for him—leopard print. A 90-year-old client had given back 18 animal-print coats to the house, and Simons immediately felt a challenge to honor in his own fashion such a substantial wedge of Dior legacy. "Extravaganza in a new way," more graphic, less vulgar. Same thing with a couple of sleek little items in double silk. Their mutated trumpet sleeves harked back to the haute-est couture, but their metallic titanium or gold sheen was gilded futurism.
16 January 2014
The prefixtrans-means, among other things, "beyond" and "changing thoroughly." There's not much more you need to know about Raf Simons' show for Christian Dior today than that this was, according to his show notes, "Trans Dior."Of course, that's not strictly true. Whether you actuallyneedto know it or not, you mightliketo know that the collection represented a startling dissection of Christian's codes, and an equally striking injection of Raf's. The bifurcated Bar jacket that launched the show was the barest statement of intent. And he's always liked badges and insignia—the emblems of clubs, gangs, tribes, youth cults—so it was fascinating to see him apply them to a clubhouse as heavily codified as Christian Dior.Equally, Simons took his own fascination with slogans, gave it a distinctly surreal spin, and embroidered it all over dresses printed with hyper-real iterations of classic Dior flora. "Alice Garden" read one such slogan, and suddenly everything fell into place: The setting for the show, a psychedelic farrago of plant life real and fake, was the wonderland into which Alice fell. We were all down the rabbit hole. "Primrose path" read another embroidered slogan. As Raf himself wondered after his show, where might that path lead?In this case, it most definitely ended up in a world where, like Alice, Dior had topsy-turvied. Ladylike pleats went sideways, Dior's pretty garden was toned toxic, seaweed beading crept eerily over shoulders and around throats. Even an otherwise lovely shirtdress in a light gray wool was bound in the indignity of a metallic-pink bustier. Something about that contrast between classic and crass felt like a clue to what Simons was up to: Respect for the past is all well and good, but the future won't wait (a metallic-pink bustier standing in, in this case, for fabulous things to come). He's always been urgent like that. And yet, given that Simons is not one of those couturiers who was born with a needle and thread in their hot little hands, his remarkable instinct for form and color revealed him here as a natural upholder of fashion's fundamentals: silk skirts that ballooned on the hips shouldn't have worked but did, with able assistance from startling combinations of green and ice pink, orange and lilac.Toward the end, Vlada Roslyakova appeared in a Bar trouser suit, the classic Dior silhouette, but when she turned, the jacket's flaring hip had been sliced into a bustle of acid-floral-printed pleats.
The Bar silhouette was also sprinkled through a final parade of strapless silver jacquard dresses. In another era, they'd probably have been called cocktail dresses, but they were metal, and each woman was wearing one of Raf's emblems, as if they were members of a secret society. Simons' Women? After Prada in Milan, and Rick Owens yesterday, it's fair to say that the tribes of fashion are in mighty shape.
26 September 2013
Raf Simons was always going to bring a new sensibility to couture, but just how new was made dazzlingly clear with his show for Christian Dior today. Freedom was the word he came back to again and again, just as he did the other night when he was talking about his own men's collection. Freedom is an idea that generates a lot of lip service, but in Simons' case, to see a genuinely free thinker applying himself to a métier as bound by tradition as couture was thrilling. "It's difficult for a designer to give up control, because you have a specific idea of what you want to do," he explained after the show. "But it's so much more satisfying to give freedom to people and see what happens." Simons must have been satisfied by the results of the freedom he gave lens legends Patrick Demarchelier, Terry Richardson, Paolo Roversi, and Willy Vanderperre to interpret his collection. They each photographed the models in the morning, and their efforts provided a massive backdrop to the show, runway and screens cross-pollinating in a constantly shifting digital tapestry.The freedom Simons really meant was the freedom to choose clothes and to choose how to wear them. It works best if there is a lot to choose from in the first place. The variety was something that leapt off the catwalk today. Haute couture is so closely identified with Paris that Simons' focus on what Dior meant as part of a global fashion culture was a bold departure. That's exactly how the clothes appeared: a different kind of dynamic in couture. Europe shared catwalk space with the Americas, Asia, and Africa: A revamped Bar jacket was followed by a sporty navy blouson; a strapless dress in tiers of spacey shibori (the Japanese process that produces that peculiar spiky fabric) preceded another strapless number vibrantly banded in shiny tribal colors. Dior himself was something of an internationalist (each collection, Simons reproduces two dresses by the old master as an homage), so it would have made sense to him. It should be said that there were some today who saw chaos in need of an edit. They missed the point: The mix was everything.But what is haute couture without a client? From the start of his stint at Dior, Simons has been fascinated by the clients. They were almost a new species to him. And it wasn't just contemporary clients he studied. He's also been engaged by legendary Dior dressers of the past, like Millicent Rogers. "She brought a strong American attitude, almost cowboylike.
" Millicent's kerchiefs were a recurrent motif in the collection. Actually, the throat action was one way to pin down exactly where you were in Raf's world: a Masai neckpiece, a Parisienne wrap, a Shinto scarf. Geography helped drive today's show. The show notes mentioned flags, colorful, optimistic emblems of national identity. The palette, the blocking, the banding and striping captured all that.The most remarkable thing in the collection may have been Simons' insistence on the normality of it all. We've said it before, we'll say it again: He is a true outsider in this industry, infatuated with the secret codes but sufficiently detached that he can create new codes all his own. "If we don't adapt to what women in society are now about, couture might disappear," Simons noted with typical Belgian logic. So what do we say? All hail the new couture.
30 June 2013
The umbrellas at Monaco's Hôtel de Paris boast the cheery motto, "It never rains in Monte Carlo." For the past three days, it has done nothingbutrain, which meant that the spectacular show staged by Dior tonight for Raf Simons' Cruise collection wasn't open to the elements as originally intended. A shame, especially when Simons said that regular visits from giant seagulls during the construction of the seaside venue had created a perfect Hitchcockian vibe. He'd hoped the birds would visit during the show itself. No such luck with the audience safely closed off from the driving rain behind thick sheets of plastic. But maybe the weather's refusal to cooperate was a blessing in disguise. The collection that Simons showed was all about the speed of life. With the promise of a glorious sunset over the Med buried under serried ranks of gunmetal storm clouds, it was easier to focus on clothes that were the very embodiment of a dynamic forward movement for Dior.Monaco made sense as a venue for a few reasons. Historically, there was the connection between Christian Dior and Princess Grace, which is now echoed by Simons' friendship with the principality's Princess Charlene. Five minutes of chat with her and it's obvious that she's a Euro-royal Katniss Everdeen. She'll do for Simons in Europe what Jennifer Lawrence has been doing for him in Hollywood. Both of them are young women on the furious move.Then there's Monaco's rep on the Formula One circuit. In a few days, the fastest folk on dry land will congregate to race through frighteningly narrow streets in terrifyingly high-strung cars. Tonight, Michel Gaubert mixed hysterically revving engines and a revision of Depeche Mode's "Behind the Wheel" to soundtrack Raf's race to the finish line with a collection that streamlined conventional Dior tropes—flowers, lace, a rounded silhouette—for the twenty-first century. First and foremost, Simons was challenging himself, the way Miuccia Prada does with things she feels she has no natural instinct for. Lace, for instance, has never been part of Raf's lingo. He didn't want the history or the romance of the stuff, so he juxtaposed it against urgent striations of color in a dress that felt like gravity was dragging it sideways. He laid lace over a bandeau top and metallic tap shorts for a carelessly sporty effect, and he streaked lace dresses with fractured, angular graphics.
But if there have been times in the past when Simons seemed like an arch iconoclast, what is increasingly coming through in his work with Dior is his ultimate respect for tradition. Why else would he try so hard to make it relevant for the new clientele that is being drawn to his clothes? So here there was a gorgeous cropped blouson with an abbreviated kimono sleeve, couture and casual in one compact package. As well as a floaty, peachy sundress in a satiny twill that wouldn't have gone amiss on Grace Kelly, but Simons bifurcated it with a zip. "A symbol of sport and dynamism," he said.He's always eulogized the movement of Christian Dior's dresses, but here, at last, he acknowledged the restriction of those original looks, so there were zips everywhere. And aerodynamism. And asymmetry. One message came through loud and clear: release yourself. That timeless incentive amplified the notion that Raf Simons is about to take Dior on a long and glorious ride.
17 May 2013
Raf Simons is partial to the wordsensitive. It's a quality he respects in people, maybe because it's something that is fundamental to the way he operates. So when he talked about the sensitivity of Christian Dior at his second prêt-à-porter show for the house today, you knew it was because he was feeling a kinship. But it was coming from a place you wouldn't quite expect. Simons is a well-known player in the contemporary art world. Turns out Dior was, too, in his pre-fashion career as a gallerist for the likes of Dalí and Giacometti. In this show, art was the thread that drew Dior and Simons closer together.Its impact on the clothes was most obvious in Simons' decision to use Andy Warhol's early drawings as a recurring graphic, just like the time he used Foujita's artwork as a leitmotif at Jil Sander. He liked the fact that Warhol is someone everyone thinks they know, but here was a finer, more sensitive take on him. Warhol's spidery shoe drawings were embroidered or—better yet—embossed on bags; his portraits of women were details on a peplum top or a bustier dress. And Simons used graphic Warholian elements on the pieces he called "memory dresses," gorgeous silk shifts that he compared to scrapbooks because they were studded with embroidered fragments that induced a fugue state of reverie (for Warhol fans, at least).Warhol also echoed in the silvered spheres suspended in the room (like the artist's iconic "clouds") and the Laurie Anderson soundtrack that reflected his anomic public persona, but as striking and memorable as this window dressing was, the collection was ultimately about the relationship between Simons and Dior. The Bar jacket—no getting around it—was paired with baggy pants in a navy or charcoal denim wool, and in one fell swoop an ironclad fashion icon surrendered to the moment. Same with the peacoat that was reconfigured as a dress in gray cashmere. Or all the asymmetry that Simons has made such a point of in his work for Dior so far, here softly draped, tied to one side with a bow, as easy as pie.If there was one clear message he was broadcasting, it was complete control. Maybe that's why Simons danced with the devil by introducing elements as ironically mumsy as a black mink coat or a crocheted suit, just to prove he could melt them into his mix by sheer force of creative will.
Just look at the way the classic "lady" silhouettes—bustier, full-skirted—were translated into black leather, or the Dior houndstooth was transmogrified into a sexy little bustier with a wrapped silk dress. Such outfits may not have been as dreamily evocative as Simons' memory dresses, but they'll likely be the ambassadors for the new Dior.
28 February 2013
When Raf Simons read Christian Dior's autobiography during his summer break in Puglia, he found unexpected parallels with his own state of mind, particularly in Dior's love of the countryside, the garden he would retreat to, the flowers he grew there. "There was such purity in that story," said Simons after his lyrical sophomore show for Dior Couture this afternoon. Lately he's been satisfying his own need to retreat into nature in his parents' garden in the village he grew up in, the place he once couldn't wait to leave. But Simons' appetite for nature was satisfied by an altogether different kind of garden today.As a metaphor for rebirth, spring can't be beat. It was always an especially big deal for Belgians, according to Simons. So he made spring come early for Dior with a collection that literalized the fashion season, evolving from sky shades of early spring evenings to a full-scale (in every way, Stephen Jones' bonnets included) celebration of the spring bride. One of Simons' preliminary goals at Dior has been, he claimed, to connect with the company's long-timers. That came through in the workmanship in today's show, as though he'd set challenges for the atelier's artisans to meet.Flowers have offered infinite possibilities to Dior'spetits mainssince Christian himself was at the helm. You could take your pick from the special effects today: beading so delicate it was almost invisible, a trompe l'oeil drift of pansies across a waistband, a cocoon of embroidered and appliquéd blooms. There is something so utterly intense about couture handwork that it can still the noise in a room—Simons' own awe was palpable in these garments.He has spoken about bringing more reality to couture. It would be a miracle if he didn't feel that way. The pants, the pockets in skirts—they were all part of that. At the same time, you have to wonder why someone would take on a couture house unless they were going to explore every permutation of possible. Simons said his first couture collection for Dior was shaped by the archive. Here, he talked about an urge to let go. The asymmetry, thedéconstruitaspect, the organicflouwere reflections of that. But so was the sleekly constructed quality Simons described as futurist. It was ingeniously precise in architectural layers: gilet over bustier over one skirt over another skirt. Hair and makeup helped: Pat McGrath's crystal lips, Guido Palau's pixie wigs. Dior's favorite model apparently had a similar haircut.
The designer also mentioned Audrey Hepburn, and Janet Leigh inPsycho."A woman who dares to be different," he said.Bracket this show with the men's collection he presented under his own name last Wednesday, and it becomes clear that Simons contains worlds. He describes his own as "dark and conceptual." The world he is creating for Dior is the opposite: serene, full of color and light. What connects the two is his purity of vision, and the endearing innocence with which it goes hand in hand. But when Simons took Haute Couture back to the garden this season, he opened up another world, and this one's our favorite. It's that world of infinite possibilities.
20 January 2013
Raf Simons' reverence for the design codes of haute couture is well-documented, but, given his innately cool Belgian objectivity, it's no surprise, now that he has an actual couture house to play with, he should be keen to bring his own reality to the fantasy that he has cherished for years. His first pre-fall collection for Dior was a litmus test—pre-fall being the most "real" collection a designer can show, because of its commercial impact. The first outfit in Simons' lookbook made a particularly convincing manifesto. Dior's hourglass Bar jacket is a couture emblem. After offering it at its most rigorous in his couture collection, Simons paired it here with a slouchy pant. Rigor relaxed. He made his point even stronger by showing the same outfit in a Japanese denim. And he raised the Bar—a higher waistline is a more flattering cut for short-waisted women. (Sarah Burton effected the same sensitive, sensible change at McQueen.)The last outfit in the lookbook also spoke its own particular volume. A billowing skirt—tied at the waist, dipping to the floor in back—had a classical couture stateliness, but it was paired with a cashmere/silk knit T-shirt. This kind of casual glamour could be a Simons signature at Dior.At the moment, it's a more successful thumbprint than the swoops of asymmetry that Simons draped down one leg, or the layering that also carried through from couture. As easy as that skirt-and-T-shirt combo looked, they felt a little forced, perhaps because they weren't particularly precise. And precision is Simons' forte. As in a white leather trench, laser-cut edges hand-painted, skirt slashed up the thigh. Or a trapeze top and skirt in floral-patterned perforations burned out by laser. A new lace, Raf-style.
13 January 2013
The Schubert piece that was playing as invitees entered the huge, purpose-built salons where Raf Simons showed his first ready-to-wear collection for Dior today was familiar, especially to fans ofThe Hunger, David Bowie's 1983 vampire movie. Simons is an ardent Bowie-phile, and the very individual choice of music was the first sign that the designer was about to impress his personality on the massive edifice that is Dior. Where Galliano achieved the same thing by amping up the house till it matched his own delirious, romantic, saturatingly sensual historicism, Simons took a long, cool look at the heritage and found the strictness, the rigor, and a different kind of sensuality. His soundtrack spoke volumes: Detroit DJ legend Carl Craig, who took over from Schubert after the show started, delivers techno with warmth. Another telling detail: At July's Couture outing, the salons were color-coded with Galliano-esque walls of lush flowers; today, the same color-coding was achieved with minimal, diaphanous curtaining. Rococo to Bauhaus—that evolution speaks another volume or two.According to the show notes—and Raf's own words—the key descriptor for this new era at Dior is "freedom." But freedom from all restraint ultimately leads to the excess of self-destruction. What we saw today, by contrast, suggested an appreciation of the power of limits. How much more inspiring is discipline than free rein. That much was already clear, by the way, in the dress rehearsal that was Simons' Couture show in July.Its achievements were revisited here, starting with the cheeky Le Smoking passage that launched proceedings in both instances. It's been impossible to ignore the media-fanned flames of the Raf-Hedi face-off that this week has generated. Simons managed to make his tux jacket-dress both a riposte to the YSL rivalry and a manifesto for himself. He de-stuffed Dior's classic Bar hourglass silhouette by turning it into something for morning, noon, and night, worn with shorts, a skirt, or nothing. Simons is clearly going to be good at the de-stuffing thing. In his ready-to-wear, as in his couture, he carved off the big below-the-waist bit of a gala gown, leaving just the visual interest of its top half. Guipure lace was turned into a two-tone bustier mini. Double-facing was responsible for a spectacular set of oh-so-simple but high-impact pop shapes in bifurcated color.
The collection's most stringently disciplined statement was also one of its best looks: Kinga Rajzak's navy and black dress in pleated tulle.Still, Simons' genuine, deep-seated affection for the tropes of couture is one of the qualities that has given a potent edge to all his design for the past few years. His full-skirted finale—the severe black silk-cashmere knit top, the erotic, iridescent balloon of floral-printed satin duchesse—distilled history into a special kind of twenty-first-century glamour.
27 September 2012
Fashion had seen nothing like it for years. Outside in the street, there was hysteria. Inside, the industry's great and good—Alaïa, Elbaz, Jacobs, Theyskens, Tisci, Van Assche, Versace, von Furstenberg—gathered to see Raf Simons debut his first haute couture collection for Christian Dior. That it would be a success seemed a given, what with the evolving polish and confidence of Simons' "couture trilogy" for his previous employer, Jil Sander. That it would besucha triumph was a thrill. The avant-garde outsider from Antwerp insinuated himself into the hallowed history of haute couture with a tour de force that had both emotionalandintellectual resonance. As the man himself said, "A shift is happening."About that outsider thing: It's a position that has always loaned a crystal clarity to Simons' vision and has helped him to the purest interpretations of his inspirations. Here, he used that unusually heightened sense of focus to reflect on Christian Dior as architect, a notion that dovetailed neatly with his own obsession with construction. The first look—a tuxedo whose jacket was shaped after Dior's iconic Bar jacket, one of the most distinctive silhouettes in fashion—established an innate compatibility that reached across a half-century.Simons has been engaged with this world for a while. Dior was obviously the guiding spirit of his fascination with midcentury couture (see the Q&A here) during his last seasons with Sander. But he approached an actual couture collection with an appropriate balance of reverence and iconoclasm. One key silhouette could best be defined as a full-skirted classic ball gown truncated at the peplum (a quote from a 1952 collection, according to the run of show), its skirt replaced by black silk cigarette pants. The formal past, the streamlined future, meeting in the middle. It was the same with the traditional Bucol silks woven to represent a painting, drips and all, by Sterling Ruby, one of the contemporary art world's hottest properties (and a Simons favorite). Past and future met again in an evening ensemble that matched the athletic ease of a citron silk knit to the grandeur of a floor-sweeping silk skirt. And the veils that Stephen Jones contributed to the finale may have been from Paris in the 1930's, but there is timeless allure in that look.
Simons returned to the flared hip of the Bar with a deep-pocketed coat-dress in red cashmere as well as a strapless dress in the same heartbreaking shade of pink that launched his last Sander show. That was the kind of subtle personal flourish that married his own story to Dior's history. It also underlined how much of an asset Simons will be not just to Dior but to couture itself. He can't help himself; he will bring a heart-on-his-sleeve human dimension to this remote and rarefied world.But as he proved today, he certainly won't be doing it in a low-key way. Christian Dior's own obsession—flowers—was translated into salons lined ceiling to floor with panels of blooms: delphiniums in the blue room, orchids in the white room, mimosa in the yellow room, and so on. More than a million all told, making a gorgeous architectural abstraction of nature. There's some kind of metaphor about creative processes in there somewhere, but it's simpler to leave things with Simons' own definition of the day: "a blueprint."
1 July 2012
Bill Gaytten's last hurrah at Dior was a dignified farewell. There was no big story (even if Fall's ballet theme insinuated itself in the form of tulle tutus). Instead, fresh, graphic black, navy, and white and a gentle nod to the iconic Bar silhouette, with its emphasis on an accentuated waist. They really did look like clothes for a particularly upscale resort or cruise. It's been pointed out more than once this season that the link between Resort as we see it now and the original purpose of the clothes is becoming ever more tenuous, but here there were some pretty sundresses and an equally pretty rose print, the same flower that appeared abstracted in a sensational necklace modeled after an original design by Christian Dior himself.Gaytten is first and foremost a cutter, and that is what he did best here, allowing just a little drama into the long, clean lines of the eveningwear. Most memorable? A decorous white plissé gown whose skirt turned on a twirl into an enormous circle, which suggested there'd be dancing on deck.
13 June 2012
The Christian Dior show today was a frustrating experience. The dither that has surrounded Dior since John Galliano's departure demands resolution, if only because you never again want to hear one single morsel of groundless speculation. With Dior's couture collection in July, it felt like Bill Gaytten was courting resolution by laying out his very capable wares. With today's show, it felt like he was putting them away again."Soft modernity" was Gaytten's theme. It was a notion whose nebulosity dogged the catwalk, where deflated New Look looks simultaneously evoked Dior's stellar past and its lunar (as in moonstruck) present. The show began well enough. The focus was on the waist—well, it would be, wouldn't it?—emphasized by a peplum's flare or a skirt's fullness.Classic portrait necklines were literally twisted in leather. Equally classic houndstooth was exploded into an abstract pattern. The models' knit skullcaps were a streamlined touch. But then, where, in the past, you might have expected takeoff from such a restrained start, there was just more of the same. Perhaps there was some well-reasoned commercial point to that—and rumors suggest the label has been doing fine under Gaytten—but it felt like Dior by the numbers.Program notes mentioned "a ballet femininity," and the full silk tulle skirts that made up the collection's evening component had a feel for that (particularly a shorter-skirted, long-sleeve raspberry outfit), but there was an intangible lifelessness to the clothes.Maybe it all comes back to the peculiarity of Gaytten's challenge. Howdoyou muster enthusiasm for your work when you have no clue what tomorrow may bring?
1 March 2012
In a similar way to the couture parade yesterday, the Dior pre-fall collection stuck to the house codes. But whereas the made-to-measure clothes had a relatively experimental x-ray edge, the ready-to-wear was more approachable. That's not to say undone. The Dior woman loves to get "dressed," be it in a bar jacket with a subtle peplum and an elongated pencil skirt or a black patent-leather coat belted snugly at the waist. The most memorable look was a narrow, blush-pink column gown with a long-sleeve jacket on top that was split down the back and trimmed in gold embroidery. As of Tuesday afternoon, a few hours after the Oscar nominations were announced, it was still unclaimed, but we can't imagine it will stay that way for long.
23 January 2012
John Galliano was always mesmerized by the inner workings of haute couture. He devoted shows to it. Standing beside him at Christian Dior for 16 years, it was inevitable that Bill Gaytten would come to share the same preoccupation. Anyway, that's the way it played out in Gaytten's second couture collection for the house. He x-rayed the craftsmanship of the Dior ateliers, and the riveting result was a show that dared to inject an unfinished quality into the most polished fashion arena of them all.Sheer layers exposed the underlying construction of garments. The black floral designs that were picked out on a flaring white skirt were like an initial guide for a master embroiderer who would fill in the colors later. On one dress, black crocodile scales were randomly picked out in patent. On another, ostrich had been dissected into paillettes of skin, like a body map. On yet another, sequins traced a grid, like a pattern-maker's directives. The mood carried all the way through to evening, where a one-shouldered black gown featured tone-on-tone embroidery and a random splatter of sequins suggesting a naïve effort to add glitz. The same effect was realized a little more fulsomely with a galleon of a dress in Dior gray, its panniers exaggerating the billows of tulle.There is a school of thought which says that mystery preserves the magic, but Gaytten understands, as did Galliano, that if you reveal the machinery, you can enhance the mystery. That's because you're throwing a spotlight on the intangibles of creativity. It was probably a coincidence, but the choice of pop ingenue Lana Del Rey as the show's musical accompaniment was perfect. She's manufactured, but it detracts not a jot from her plangent allure. Something else to consider: In its charmingly unfinished tentativeness, this felt like the sort of collection a designer might offer if he was laying out a blueprint for the future—this is me, this is what I can do and how I can do it. Curiouser and curiouser, as the decision on the Dior succession continues to dangle like a hanging chad.
22 January 2012
The prettiness of today's Christian Dior show may have felt like a safe move, but after the beating Bill Gaytten and his team took following a misjudged Couture collection, who can blame them? The expectations facing Dior's first prêt-à-porter show since John Galliano's ouster were mixed—or maybe just muddied by the endless roundelay of succession speculation that has turned the label into a fashion soap opera. So what Gaytten and co. delivered may have been the only sane response to an impossible situation: head back to ground zero, the archives where the Dior legacy rests untroubled by the wayward to-and-fro-ing of topical vagaries. It was an especially timely move, given that haute couture's past has exerted an unholy influence over prêt-à-porter's present this season. Time to remind the world that Dior owns a lot of those looks.So a dressed-up mood ran through the entire collection, not simply the gazar and organza that so many of the outfits were cut from, but the classic Bar jacket, modernized with a wider neckline; the Grace Kelly dress with the wrapped bodice; the orange-red silk and tulle dance number tied at the waist with a huge bow. And the evening section that closed the show felt like an immaculate parade of Hollywood legend Adrian's Art Deco gowns.
29 September 2011
You can't be down on a boy with a dream. For decades, Bill Gaytten strives under John Galliano's yoke as one of his most intimate facilitators, then suddenly fate conspires to throw him into the lead role, and he has the means to do everything he has ever wanted to do, everything he has ever bitten his tongue over. What's more, he has a team of the industry's best who have cherished him these long years for the adorable creature he is, and they are prepared to help him realize his dream: Stephen Jones with his headpieces, Jeremy Healy on beats, Michael Howells with his set design, Pat McGrath on makeup, Orlando Pita on hair. And they do this not just because they love Bill but because they want to acknowledge the achievements of his fallen master.So what happens next?On the evidence of today's first Dior couture show without John Galliano, what happens is a misjudged effort to impress an alien thumbprint on an aesthetic that, for better or worse, is one of the fashion industry's most clearly defined. After the show, a remarkably sanguine, even elated Gaytten was perfectly happy to celebrate the opportunity he'd been given to bring his own tastes to the fore, and they were significantly architectural: Frank Gehry, Jean-Michel Frank, the Memphis movement of the eighties. The opening outfit—a crazy-paving jacket with a ruffled collar and a full pleated skirt—kind of caught the postmodern madness of Memphis. And the subsequent parade of folded, tiered, unfinished taffeta, gazar, and organza had a similar assault-on-couture-orthodoxy vibe. There was a Bar jacket or two in the mix, acknowledging Dior's legacy, but the overriding sense was that a demon, long-contained, had been released, so that the Dior woman had suddenly been possessed by a disco dolly who, to the strains of Grace Jones, would blow out her hair and rampage to the nearest dance floor in a molto-bat-winged hostess gown that perfectly captured the campiness of cult-fave TV playAbigail's Party.There were also echoes of one gloriously mad moment in Italian fashion when denim prophet Adriano Goldschmied produced clothes under a label he called Bobo Kaminsky, but that could hardly be considered a reference point for haute couture. The finale brought together black in a Napoleon hat, white in a crown of stars. There was one dress draped party-style in tinsel, another splattered with crystals.
Then came Karlie Kloss, dressed as a Pierrot, sad clown all alone in the spotlight as the soundtrack failed and glitter showered down. But the stardust missed her bythis much. And that felt like some kind of crazy cosmic metaphor.So, once again, what happens next?
3 July 2011
Acknowledging the fact that Resort is the collection that lingers longest on store rails, Dior's latest managed a clear, clean arc from city smart to holiday luxe. The former featured neutrals made graphic with geometric banding and structured silhouettes, like the black and beige coat in double-faced wool, or the classic Bar jacket updated with a little pleated skirt. The latter was summed up by a caftan in cobalt blue mousseline, with a bodice encrusted with embroidery. That blue, along with coral, helped create a summer-in-Portofino vibe. If a resort could claim royalties for atmosphere theft, Portofino would surely be that place this season, and Slim Aarons could stake a claim too, because his photographs of the monied at play have been equally influential.Maybe that accounted for the sixties flavor, not just in those Liz Taylor-worthy caftans and a handful of crocheted hostess gowns, but in gamine drop-waist dresses with ruffled hems, made slightly exotic with bands of sequins so tiny they looked like liquid metal. The footwear (latticed raffia flats) and accessories (big resin bracelets for stacking up the arm Nancy Cunard-style) did as much work as the clothes in conveying the collection's message.
22 June 2011
Coincidence is a bitch. Outside the Dior show today, copies of theHerald Tribunewere being distributed in a long-planned fashion week wraparound advertising Dior Addict Lipstick. Not the best time or place to be reinforcing the catastrophic career implosion of disgraced and dismissed Dior designer John Galliano. Inside the tent erected in the gardens of the Musée Rodin, the set—a chandeliered salon—was prime Galliano, but its silveriness now looked haunted rather than chic. And when the lights went down, a more-than-expectant hush fell over the huge crowd. (So much for the rumors of boycott.)But before the march of the models began, Dior CEO Sidney Toledano appeared onstage to make a lengthy speech in French about the values that Christian Dior—both the man and the business he founded—has represented for more than six decades. Toledano referred to the recent egregious flouting of these values without once mentioning Galliano by name, but went on to assert that they would continue to be upheld by "the heart of the House of Dior, which beats unseen... made up of its teams and studios, of its seamstresses and craftsmen."Overtaken by events, this ready-to-wear show ended up as a swan song, but it was a pale testament to the extraordinary work the ateliers have done for Galliano over the past 14 years. The proper tribute would ideally have been one of the Dior couture shows, where the extravagant drama of the designer's soaring imagination was evenly matched by breathtaking workmanship. Still, there was enough of that symbiosis between creator and atelier to give today's opening outfits some oomph. Karlie Kloss stalked down the catwalk in a huge hat, buckled knee boots, velvet britches, and a sweeping cashmere cloak, over what looked like a leather baby doll. She could have been a female Byron—or a highwaywoman. Either way, a romantic renegade has always been the quintessential Galliano woman.Colors were rich, textures were lush, and there was a layered louche-ness that amplified the bohemian theme: One black velour coat with brocade sleeves and red fox collar and cuffs was draped over a cashmere waistcoat and a long mousseline blouse, with those knee boots. Like an artist's muse had roused herself from his bed, thrown on a top, a gorgeous coat, some shoes—and left it at that. Galliano has always had a keen ability to provoke such fantasias in his audience. Some of that has clearly rubbed off on his design team.
There was plenty of fodder to follow, from a tweedy jacket over faille short shorts to a cashmere princess coat over velvet knickerbockers to a pink python tunic over a fuzzy plaid skirt. Then, ever onward to the point of repetitious overload, especially by the time Merry Widow looks kicked in. Evening dissolved into tiers of sheer pastel chiffon, lace, and tulle with a Directoire bent. It was often wont to do that with John himself, except here there was an inescapable sense that a whole lot of stuff just needed to be got out and got done with.Quite how you sign off on one of the most extraordinary careers in contemporary fashion without the participation of its prime protagonist is a challenge you'd probably wish on your deadliest business competitor. Dior orchestrated a gracious envoi, with those seamstresses and craftsmen that Toledano eulogized in his speech gathered onstage while the crowd cheered and wept. Whatever happens next, here, at least, they were waving the last wave. The only precedent for this situation is Coco Chanel's postwar denunciation as a Nazicollaboratrice. Her exile from the fashion world lasted nine years.
3 March 2011
John Galliano originally studied to be a fashion illustrator at Central Saint Martins. He'd even signed a contract for a job in Manhattan. Then the hand of fate turned his head to design. Oh, how different things might have been. For one thing, we'd never have gotten theDiorcouture show we saw today.Galliano's salute to René Gruau, the illustrator whose work for Christian Dior in the forties and fifties created the house's most iconic imagery, felt like it had been a long time coming, not just because of the designer's own early aspirations, but because it gave him another opportunity to indulge his passion for an era when couture was truly haute.Even that golden age would have been hard-pressed to match the achievements of the atelier Galliano has at his disposal. The graphite smears, pencil strokes and scribbles, erasure marks, and gouache washes of Gruau's illustrations were duplicated in cloth and embroidery, used, said the designer, "in an illustrative way." He called it his most technically challenging collection, but the effort was rarely obvious. It was remarkable that such extravagance managed to capture the speed, the spontaneity, the airiness, even the economy of the illustrator's work. Opulently swagged tops and gowns bobbed and floated like billowing sails. One utterly gorgeous thing hid roses in clouds of white marabou. Dior's New Look was an obvious source point for skirts that flared from corseted waists or dropped pencil-thin to below the knee from rounded hips.The most dramatic effects were chiaroscuro—the interplay of light and shade, duplicating the wash of Gruau's watercolors and the shadows of Irving Penn's classic couture photography. Where it seemed that hand-painting fabric would have been the simplest way to achieve the desired result, Galliano and his studio used seven layers of tulle to create a shimmering depth of dégradé. The effect was as quietly impressive as the wash of dark pink down a pale pink gown. Embroidery was used on one side of the fabric only, so it cast a subtle relief shadow. Ostrich feathers made swooshes of ink on a huge ball gown, pencil lines were picked out in sequins. And Stephen Jones was in his element—his hats were trompe l'oeil strokes of paint, soaring heavenward.Orlando Pita's hair and Pat McGrath's makeup duplicated the mesmerizing artifice of the iconic creatures Gruau drew for Dior.
You left the show with the feeling that everyone involved had an absolute ball, creating the haute-est fashion for the sheer, pleasurable hell of it. Today, the question of how any of it would convert to anything approaching the real world could be handily put off until Galliano's ready-to-wear show in March. Speaking of that real world, the designer's latest transformation, adapted from his Nureyev-influenced menswear collection the other day, actually made him look like Al Pacino inDog Day Afternoon.
23 January 2011
For hisDiorpre-fall collection, John Galliano galloped the Duchess of Windsor throughThis Is Your Life, with richly hued musings on what Wallis Simpson in her prime might've worn at specific times of day and across the decades. In the designer's hands, an Anglo-Saxon take on style codes still conveys a very Parisian attitude.Since this is the Duchess, let's start with the chase: A Scottish hunting theme opened with forties-inspired tartan skirtsuits in eccentric colors such as lavender and sage, trimmed (or not) with fur. A menswear-inspired car coat and lightweight furs on knits offered coverage for mini-kilts and argyle sweaters; those who walk on the wilder side could opt for a shiny green, brown, and white python slicker.The collection was long on daywear, but Galliano's evening options more than held their own. The flapper dresses in black and nude or in ribbons of pink silk embroidered with crystals, not to mention the goddess gowns, will no doubt be winging their way to the West Coast for the awards shows.And what about the duchess' legendary taste in jewelry? From high (chains strung with diamonds as big as the Ritz, huge pearls with Fabergé-inspired enamel caps) to low (new Dior It Yourself charm necklaces, bracelets, and brooches), there were baubles to spare.
11 January 2011
The umbilical connection between John Galliano's couture collections and his ready-to-wear shows for Christian Dior couldn't help but generate anticipation for today's presentation. How would he transmute that gorgeous floral extravaganza he delivered in July? In a typically cunning lateral move, the designer drew a bead on the tropics, which his congenital showmanship turned into a riff on aSouth Pacific-style fantasy of spic-and-span naval men and their fabulous floozies.The masculine edge of the spectrum came off best: A white parka, a gunmetal blue leather peacoat, a suede flying jacket, and a navy donkey jacket had a refreshingly straightforward gutsiness. Galliano served the island theme best in a Hawaiian-printed halter dress, a hot little peekaboo crocheted silk number, and a ruffled turquoise shift embroidered with big orange flowers. But then the energy seemed to slip away as night fell over Michael Howells' driftwood beach-house set and the girls came out in a string of sheer silks. The colors were suitably tropical, but there was a vampy, campy lassitude in the boudoir-ness of it all, a fact that the Roxy Music-heavy soundtrack acknowledged. Kudos, however, to Iris Strubegger for channeling Joan Crawford so brilliantly.
30 September 2010
Right now, in the Paris hotel rooms of many fashion editors, there are bunches of flowers, plastic-wrapped and raffia-tied. When they returned to their rooms after the Dior couture show today, did the attendees make the connection between what they'd just seen on the catwalk and what was sitting in a vase in front of them? Stephen Jones created headgear that looked like a florist's plastic wrap. Someone else contributed the raffia belts. And nature did the rest. "It's the most inspiring teacher," said John Galliano, after a show that was a hymn to all things floral.Part of his research involved studying real flowers, spending an hour watching the light change on a parrot tulip, for instance. That partly explained the collection's wonderful colors, especially the vibrancy of the dégradé effects. You could attribute the rest to Galliano's contemplation of images by the two great flower photographersde nos jours, Irving Penn and Nick Knight. Dior himself obliged with the silhouette, a tulip shape that Galliano seemed to feel Mr. Christian had never really made the most of. He certainly sorted that out.Perhaps it was the precision of the inspiration that accounted for the show's clarity, not only in the palette but in the delicate techniques. The fronding, the feathering, the ruching, the ruffling—all duplicated the extraordinary intricacies of flowers. Delicate they may be in nature, but his objects of study gave Galliano free rein to be bold with a coat like a huge inverted daffodil and a dress in black taffeta that was hand-painted with pansies. It's unlikely that when he compared himself to ajardinièretending his blooms, the designer had attendees like Blake Lively, Jessica Alba, and Lou Doillon in mind, but you could imagine them being seduced by his hybrids, the jacket and skirt combinations like the white felt over lilac organza, or the jade mohair with a swoop of portrait neckline over a petaled bubble of black organza.In an Edenic fashion world, this would be the daywear that would fully complement evening dresses of an extraordinary dimension—gigantic domes of tulle overlaid with gloriously colored swags of organza. On the opening day of the Paris couture, the casual insolence of the draped one-shoulder outfit that closed the show was a provocation. "Beatthis," it declared.
4 July 2010
Dior made its runway debut in Shanghai on Saturday night with a sixties-chic Cruise collection inspired by the French New Wave. In the front row were house muses Charlize Theron and Marion Cotillard. They joined LVMH chairman Bernard Arnault, Dior CEO Sidney Toledano, and some 500 guests in a 150-meter Dior gray tent constructed along the Huangpu River in the historic colonial district the Bund, not far from the site where Chanel put on its pre-fall show last December.On his third visit to China since 2002, designer John Galliano made it clear that this was not to be a dose of chinoiserie à la Dior. "I didn't really want to do 'China' at all. Not only because I have done that, but because I didn't think it was appropriate," the designer said. "I just thought it would be really fierce, really cool, to presentle savoir faire français." And that he did, with a savvy blend of ready-to-wear and couture. "I was just trying to recapture that excitement that was happening at that time in Paris, which is very similar to what is happening in Shanghai today," he said.After a sneak preview of theLady Blue Shanghaifilm directed by David Lynch and starring Cotillard, the show started with a flash of lights and dance music mixed with live accompaniment by the Shanghai Sinfonietta.Jean Seberg marine stripes, gamine trenches, and fedoras teamed with tapering, cropped pants marked a series of boyish looks that included a Jean-Paul Belmondo-inspired three-piece suit. On the other end of the masculine-feminine spectrum, there were coquettish minidresses in candy colors adorned with bows.House codes like the rose were everywhere, from prints on shift coats to choker necklaces and handbags that accompanied almost every look. Mr. Dior's beloved Prince of Wales check became new on Bar jackets and trenches, woven as it was to echo the caning motif on the Lady Dior bags. Meanwhile, a Bardot-esque pale-blue gingham dress was cut from innovative, almost weightless organza, and flashes of superlight leather, like Karlie Kloss' sculptured opening number in shocking pink, added a frisson of sex appeal.On the couture front, it was trademark Galliano romance: corseted lace dresses and grand ball gowns showered in embroidery, including a candy-pink dégradé silk organza showstopper that just might seduce a new generation of privileged Chinese clients.
The show was the climax to a two-day extravaganza that included the reopening of Dior's Peter Marino-designed Plaza 66 boutique, now twice its former size, and the launch of the new fragrance Escale à Shanghai, as well as a grand exhibition of archival clothing, art, and films. But at the after-party, as guests partied to the live sounds of Kelis against the shimmering backdrop of the iconic Pearl Tower, it was clear that brand Dior has its eyes on the future.
14 May 2010
With a clap of thunder, the neigh of a horse, and the clippety-clop of coconut shells on the opening soundtrack, it wasn't hard to see where John Galliano was going with Fall. Dior's ready-to-wear was equestrian-themed, a follow-on from the daywear strand of the acclaimed Couture show in January. After Karlie Kloss had swept on, swirling a brown leather highwayman's cape over a ruffled pink chiffon dress and brown thigh boots, the narrative was established: This was to be a brisk albeit slightly perfunctory trot around the circuit of Galliano's longtime favorite eighteenth-century redingote shapes, hacking jackets, and jodhpurs, interspersed with many more of the little chiffon dresses.As the show took a detour into citified country clothes—checked wool pencil skirts, baker boy caps, and a blanket coat in mohair—it was the knitwear that ended up commanding the most attention. This is, after all, the season where unexpected ways of knitting have been a focal point in such influential collections as Prada and Dolce & Gabbana. Dior's answers were a cream oversize cardigan-coat, threaded through with blue satin ribbon, and two lacy raschel-knit dresses.The whole impression? Item by item, there was plenty to go on, from the furs—treated to a new technique that mimics dressy layered frills, edged with an eyelash fringe—to the heavily reiterated thigh boot to the dirty-pastel georgette evening gowns. The drawback was the number of georgette dresses in the show, which tipped it at times too far in the direction of the things Galliano does in his own collection.
4 March 2010
A military tin helmet remade in leather, a scarf turban, and a beret: The headgear alone is enough to whisk the imagination into the zone of air raids, blackouts, and plucky WWII heroines playing their part while, quite possibly, having some off-duty fun with the GIs.That Christian Dior had troubled to theme its pre-fall collection so coherently and with such attention to detail again reinforces the importance of this in-between season—no longer second-league clothes shown to buyers on racks but a full, competitive camera-ready production for general release. After all, this is where the daywear is for Dior, and this season it played as a military sequel to the film noir hit the house put out for Spring. The Eisenhower jackets and bombers, pencil skirts with military pockets, and fur-collared tweed coats, all in shades of khaki, olive, and brown, do an excellent job of saluting the trends while maintaining Parisian standards of fit and timelessness. And for evening, the silver lamé siren dress—spot-on for the coming season—looked far too accomplished to be classified as a mere understudy.
25 January 2010
Haughty, crop-switching equestriennes in top hats, veils, and impeccable riding habits; incredible ball gowns swathed and swagged in dozens of yards of duchesse satin: This was one of those occasions when John Galliano pushed a Dior couture show into the realms of sensory overload. He'd been galvanized by a research trip to the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum, where—just up his romantic street—he lost himself in a recent bequest of Charles James gowns being prepared for this spring's exhibitionAmerican Woman. "I was reading that, actually, it was Charles James who influenced Monsieur Dior to come up with the New Look," he said. "And then I was looking at a photo of Charles James doing a fitting—and on the wall behind him was a picture of women riding sidesaddle. And that was it!"That eureka moment—plus the images of Gibson girls and Millicent Rogers in the museum's archive—gave Galliano the imaginative license to relate nip-waisted Dior jackets with full riding skirts to frothy "Naughty Nineties" pastel cocktail dresses and end with a sustained tour de force of satin whipped into ball gowns of an opulence that would have sent Cecil Beaton into seventh heaven. By the time the last came out—a rose-tinted bustier with ice-blue petaled skirts dusted with crystal—you could hear gasps of girly delight from the front-row clients. The fight for who will wear what at the Costume Institute Gala is officially on.Quite apart from the double-layered references, neatly trimmed to both house tradition and the upcoming American moment, this was an example of Dior teamwork meshing at optimum force. From the models' performances—Karlie Kloss walking as if she were a thoroughbred dressage pony herself—to Pat McGrath's porcelain-perfect makeup and matte red lips, to Stephen Jones' giant snoods, veils, and hats, right through to Michael Howells' backdrop of 3,000 overblown pastel roses, it made for an unforgettable coming together of live atmosphere, detail, and voluptuous visual pleasure. After two seasons in which Galliano has set the fashion agenda with hit lingerie collections at Dior, he is, forgive the pun, a designer firmly back in the saddle.
24 January 2010
Style.com did not review the Fall 2010 menswear collections. Please enjoy the photos, and stay tuned for our complete coverage of the Spring 2011 collections, including reviews of each show by Tim Blanks.
22 January 2010
Double respect is due to John Galliano this season. First, it was he who entered the subject of lingerie at the top of fashion's agenda. Back in July, he showed his tailoring-with-underwear Christian Dior couture collection, and since then swaths of designers have being going at it with the visible frillies. Second, for ready-to-wear, he seized his advantage, melding a soft, delightfully thought-out version of the idea into a show with a forties film noir theme.Galliano said he found the cinematic cue while thinking about Lauren Bacall. "She was a great Dior client; there are amazing photos of her in the salon with Bogart. It was that and Arletty inHôtel du Nord," he said. That central character—a provocative, smoldering femme fatale with a side-parted, over-one-eye hairdo and red lips—gave him free reign to script a wardrobe narrative. It started with abbreviated wartime trenchcoats, flipped through silver lamé dresses, arrived at a sequence in which the heroine is seen in her scanties, and then followed her out to make a drop-dead entrance in some nightclub or other.Galliano turned the skimpies—French lace-trimmed cami-knickers and satin teddies—into a contemporary version of this summer's shorts and playsuits, following through with a trousseau's worth of pretty boudoir baby dolls and tiny, fragile flowered chiffon dresses. Cleverly, the transparencies—such as a purple satin bra-and-knicker set, apparently seen through black tulle—were an illusion created by stretch, paneled underlayers, so that the pieces are actually slipped on in one. Stocking tops seen through the sheer panels in a copper lamé dress, and bras and panties glimpsed under a semitransparent tiered blue gown, were actually shadows stitched into underslips.By night, the glamour was amped up even further, as Galliano put his heroine into a flesh pink corset and a long draped mint green sequin-sprinkled skirt, a Chantilly-smothered basque and black ruffled skirt, and a vamp red satin gown. For perhaps the first time, it meant that Galliano had captured the romantic essence of his Dior couture and made sense of it as fully resolved ready-to-wear. It'll be expensive, of course, but oh so seductive.
1 October 2009
If anyone ever pondered the question of how a Dior couture show would play minus the smoke, mirrors, deafening music, extravagant sets, and locations—and haven't we all?—now we know. For Fall, John Galliano took the collection back to the dove gray salons of the Christian Dior headquarters in the Avenue Montaigne to show almost in the way the clothes were traditionally presented to clients and the press in the 1950's. And to be honest, sans the heart-pounding stress, stadium-size crowds, and general hurly-burly, it was a lovelier, more intimate parade to behold.Galliano said he'd been inspired by behind-the-scenes documentary photographs taken more than half a century ago as Monsieur Dior dressed hiscabineof mannequins for shows. The conceit of half-dressed models informed the collection, so that hip-emphasizing basques, girdles, lace-edged slips, and petticoats were hybridized into brightly colored variations on the classic wasp-waisted silhouette of Dior's New Look. The effects—reworked Bar peplum jackets, draped bubble skirts, padded-hip coats, and full-skirted evening gowns—came punched up with a zinging palette of orange, lime, raspberry, and yellow, contrasted with the pretty flesh tones of fifties under-things. Nothing particularly novel, or even mildly shocking, but Galliano turned that to his advantage. It's a moment when reemphasizing house values is a wise tactical move.
5 July 2009
Style.com did not review the Spring 2010 menswear collections. Please enjoy the photos, and stay tuned for our complete coverage of the Spring 2011 collections, including reviews of each show by Tim Blanks.
27 June 2009
"[Mitzah] Bricard is one of those people, increasingly rare, who make elegance their sole reason for being," wrote Christian Dior in his autobiography,Christian Dior and I. How could John Galliano resist a muse like that? For Resort, he revisited the patternmaker-turned-atelier power broker's beloved leopard spots and her favorite shade of lilac, whipping them up into fifties-ish pieces like a belted sheath, a three-quarter-sleeve pullover blouse worn with a black leather pencil skirt, and a swingy knee-length coat with contrast lapels. Pearls figured large in Bricard's repertoire, too, so the models wore multiple strands with everything from houndstooth skirtsuits to softly draping floor-length evening dresses. Galliano's light touch, especially on a graceful nipped-waist black lace dress, made the retro shapes look modern.
15 June 2009
Squaring circles is the name of the game for every established house this season. In a nutshell: How do you keep customers (i.e., freaked-out department stores and skeptical, reality-seeking shoppers) onside, while also keeping up the dialogue with fashion? At Dior, John Galliano found an easy compromise with a collection lightly based on the orientalism of Paul Poiret, an artistic Parisian craze dating back almost a century. No need for frantic reference-Googling here: The main point of Galliano's device is that it gave access to the areas of harem pants, rich gilded brocades, and Asian influences in general. Christian Dior never went East himself, certainly, but the notion wove ikat patterns, cheongsam fastenings, paisley prints, and those newly fashionable trousers into the house codes in a way that came out making sense for the many markets Galliano has to juggle.Happily, there was no sense of straining for a recession solution about it. After treating Dior's standard suitings to a light, shortened adaptation of Poiret's hobble skirt, Galliano moved on to paisley-print day dresses and thence to the drapey harems (best in cream satin with a pale beige astrakhan gilet). That opened a neat portal through which Galliano's romantic, silver filigree Indian-embroidered chiffon cocktail and evening dresses could pass, looking effortlessly pretty. The result: grown-up fare for regular women, editorial-grade styling to appeal to the fashion press, and, in total, a clever feat of simultaneous translation from a well-traveled designer who knows how to reach his global markets.
5 March 2009
There are only two questions anyone is asking Paris couturiers this season: "What are your inspirations?" followed swiftly by, "And what do you think about the recession?" John Galliano's answers were "Flemish painters and Monsieur Dior," and to the point, "There's a credit crunch, not a creative crunch. Of course, everyone is being more careful with their discretionary purchases. I am. But it's our job to make people dream, and to provide the value in quality, cut, and imagination."He'd cross-referenced the soft blues and golds of Vermeer and the elaborate lace collars and sleeves of Van Dyck with typically Galliano-esque hyper-exaggerations of Dior's tight-waisted, full-skirted fifties shapes. As a starting point, it evoked some of the romantic femininity of Dior's silhouette, but with surface ruffles and bouncing crinolined hemlines that went way beyond any sense of postwar austerity. As for the seventeenth-century Dutch elements, there were cross-laced corseted backs and cartridge-paper scrolls standing out on hips, and, as things progressed, tulip prints and blue-and-white Delftware embroideries peeking from the underskirts. The finale dress, in a gorgeous deep burnt red, had the stately dignity of an historical movie costume—not so muchGirl With a Pearl Earringas Rembrandt'sJewish Bride( OK, that's yet to be made, but the color's exact).Oddly, though, the clothes became lovelier when the collection didn't stick so literally to the Old Masters—either painterly ones, or the founder of the house. When Galliano escaped the sweet Vermeer palette and moved into ivory, as he did with a slim dress implanted with raw-edged georgette rosettes and embroidered with silver leaves, or with an ingenue off-the-shoulder fifties dance dress banded with black bows, it all seemed simpler, fresher, less stilted. And more like the kind of thing that will actually keep Dior clients dreaming, and, hopefully, spending.
25 January 2009
Reference points for Dior's pre-fall collection included Helmut Newton and Alfred Hitchcock, both men who idealized icy blondes. Unsurprisingly, it was easy to imagine such a creature in the nipped-waist belted jackets and the flaring full skirts, which exhibited John Galliano's instinctive feel for the Dior originals. The same muse would have gone for a rose-printed dress with a big bow back, or another dress that buttonedallthe way down the spine. You'd need a lover or a dresser for that one. But there was also something of Dietrich in a dotted chiffon blouse paired with a black pencil skirt, or a leopard coat trimmed in red fox. With their little platforms and 15-mm metal heels, the shoes were a perfect crystallization of the fashion fetishism that informed the collection.
22 January 2009
One of the subtexts of the moment is that so many people are looking back 20 years to the high eighties, when Parisian designers like Azzedine Alaïa, Jean Paul Gaultier, Thierry Mugler, and Claude Montana were in the ascendant. (Coincidentally, Martin Margiela has a 20th anniversary this year, and Suzy Menkes has been celebrating 20 years at theInternational Herald Tribune.) John Galliano has had 1988 and all that on his mind, too, judging by today's collection, in which he cast his eye back to that glamazonian era of corseted waists, pointy bras, Lycra leggings, and body-conscious knitted dresses—a time before the models on his Dior runway were born.It was clearly Alaïa and Gaultier in "Tribal" mode Galliano was referencing with all his short flippy dresses with sheer skirts, bodysuits, python jackets, spotty animal prints, and jutting bras. If there was nothing too discernibly Dior-esque here, the house's offerings were admittedly forgettable in those years—and anyway, the people Galliano seems to be aiming at this season will be too young to know or care either way. (Carla Bruni-Sarkozy is going to find herself pretty stuck for diplomatic daywear, though she might home in on an adaptation of the pink cowrie shell-embroidered evening dress as one non-sheer option to cover her for a state dinner.) Ultimately, there was no shaking off the impression that this collection lacked the creative fire of John Galliano at his best.
28 September 2008
In a way, it was a classic: combining the indelible fifties inspiration of Lisa Fonssagrives, Dior mannequin and wife of Irving Penn, and that of the new model of French conservative chic, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy. Those two streams of thought merged into a collection John Galliano called “fresh couture—restrained and refined.” If it didn't exactly result in 100 percent conventionality (there were plenty of sheer skirts and fetishistic patent belts that might not work at a political summit), the happy fact that the first lady of France has chosen to dress at Dior gave Galliano full rein to revel in the realms of glamour the house established 60 years ago.The templates were all there: big coats, wasp waists, nipped jackets, circle skirts, tulle dance dresses, architectural gowns cut from spiraling lace and jutting scrolls of crin. Mostly framed in black and white, with tints of gray, caramel, Parma violet, mint, and chartreuse to follow, the shapes traced familiar silhouettes—albeit a familiarity shot through with Galliano’s irrepressible touches of perversity. A nod to Dior’s New Look peplum became a stiff patent hip-jutting belt with cross-lacing in the back, and a knowing acknowledgment of the basis of the hourglass silhouette came in a couple of see-through gowns with the corsetry fully on display. Still, this was Christian Dior very much under control and within the scope of reality. Add some lingerie and take off the belts, and it’s no stretch at all to imagine Madame Sarkozy finding plenty here to wow the world in her demure manner, come fall.
29 June 2008
John Galliano marked the unofficial kickoff to a season that retailers and even editors have all but officially accepted as full-fledged. (Can't you just sense the ticking clock strapped to its haphazard, spread-out schedule?) He did so for the third year running with the full pomp and celebrity we've come to expect chez Dior. Like iron shavings drawn to a magnet, a fleet of town cars bounced along underneath the 59th Street Bridge and disgorged their precious cargo—Jennifer Lopez (with an adoring Marc Anthony), Christina Aguilera, Lauren Hutton, Charlize Theron—outside the soaring, vaulted space of Guastavino's restaurant.Lately, Galliano has been mining the good old U.S. of A. for raw material from which to spin his dreams. For a season as commercially skewed as resort, Yankee practicality seems an apt starting point. Which isn't to say that the designer has been studying Hillary Clinton's pantsuits. More up his avenue are grandes dames like Barbara Hutton, Millicent Rogers, and Nan Kempner—women who weren't afraid to make a bold sartorial statement, one that preferably involved a whopping piece of jewelry. From a shimmering backdrop that conjured a Tony Duquette garden, there emerged a full wardrobe for their modern-day counterparts in Palm Beach, Beverly Hills, and Dallas. Rendered in a bouncy, optimistic palette of corals, fuchsias, and limes, nearly every look was heavy on the beaded embroidery (down to the swimwear and shoes) and topped off with outsized sombreros and bijoux.With its sixties-era strains of printed tunics, capri pants, trapeze silhouettes, little peplum jackets, and haute bohemian caftans and peasant blouses, the collection hewed closely to the line Galliano sent out last season. Both are light-years from the spartan look of his first resort show. A little retail love is likely the guiding force for that continuing direction. (At least one high-living social was heard singing the new collection's praises on her way out.) What this season is really about is not so much breaking the mold as delivering a vision of the good life—and Galliano can do that in spades.
11 May 2008
Imagine Mrs. Robinson inValley of the Dolls, and you more or less have the measure of Christian Dior for Fall: gigantic back-combed hairdos, equally gigantic eye makeup, and the neat ladylike suits and dresses beloved of Kennedy-era America. It was a trip around what John Galliano called the "optimism and opulence" of the sixties, amped up with bright color, lashings of paillette embroidery, and Western hats.Decidedly, though, this was Galliano in general-service mode rather than personal fantasyland. Chop off the heads, as it were, and what was left was a wearable collection that will be legible to all women who crave a straight-up injection of high-octane glamour as an antidote to gloom. It involved boxy jackets worn with A-line skirts and detailed with standaway collars and covered buttons; luxe minks and chinchillas cut in horizontal bands; Dior houndstooth checks bound with black patent edgings; a few rounded-off, overlapping mid-century geometric prints; and bejeweled bubble dresses for evening. Nothing, then, either to scare (not even the shoes, which were stack-heeled and supernormal) or to set new agendas—but simply a demonstration of Galliano's increasing facility for running up money-spinning ready-to-wear calculated to read across continents.
24 February 2008
Who else could open a supposed treatise on Symbolist painters (quick, log onto Wikipedia!) with a blast of Led Zeppelin, gigantic overblown shapes, eye-watering color, and a whole lotta bling? Why, only John Galliano in his haute couture mode, of course. He blew vast volumes of air into multiple meters of duchesse satin, and whorled floriform shapes and swing-back swags into every passing silhouette. For garnish, there were great plastic flowers, chunks of sparkle, and frissons of dangly paillettes as embroidery. Topping it all off: towering laquered updos—"inspired by Vreeland'sVogue," he said—with myriad lamp-shade and saucer hats made to hover over them by the gravity-defying hand of Stephen Jones.Somehow, Galliano's primrose path of inspiration had, he said, wended its way from John Singer Sargent'sMadame Xthrough to the gilded swirls and bejeweled geometrics of Gustav Klimt. All that richness—plus the vibrant reds, magentas, yellows, purples, and limes—meant the collection teetered (atop vertiginous à la Japonaise platforms) on the brink of overload. Still, strange as it may seem, this was not one of Galliano's more manic excursions into fantasy costume. In the end, something in the odd air of high-society sixties hauteur came over as surprisingly chic.
20 January 2008
Christian Dior's 60th birthday celebration was a grand bouffée of such vast and extended proportions—couture at Versailles in July, resort in New York in August, a monumental Paris dinner in September—that the only place left to go had to be back down to earth. As a global behemoth, Dior does publicity like no one else (except its LVMH sister Louis Vuitton), and so, after all the heady image-making, a pragmatic payoff was obviously the plan for ready-to-wear.Sting'sEnglishman in New Yorkset the theme (he was there in the audience, too) for a light, nonintellectual revival of all the patterns John Galliano has amassed through his ten-year career at Dior. Under the guise of twenties-through-forties styling, he brought back his pantsuits as pinstripe three-pieces and Marlene Dietrich white-tie tailcoats, reprised the pagoda-shouldered silhouettes of his Madame Butterfly collection, and, of course, laid on a rendering of his signature bias cutting in jazz-age chiffon and thirties charmeuse.Is Galliano at his happiest when discharging such commercial duties? In the past, it's grated on him, but this wasn't one of his camp-hysteria evasions, nor was it one of his more passive-aggressive collections of bottom-line merchandise. There were pretty, accessible things: palest dustyeau-de-nilchiffons, a sugar-pink, silver-embroidered evening jacket with a sinuous, traily skirt, and a knowing nod to the current feel for pajama dressing. Oh, and handbags. In one sense, the show made an unexceptionable job of broadcasting what Christian Dior stands for in reality through the many markets it has conquered—it was a counterweight to the high-flown flourishes of earlier this year. In another, it missed the flair and humor Galliano can muster at his best. If there was any lingering hint of ennui in Sting's insistent refrain of "I'm an alien" (Galliano is a great one for sending aural messages), it didn't extend to the designer's frankly hilarious finale pose as a cigarette-smoking Englishman, caught in top hat, tails, voluminous white underpants, and a pair of suspendered socks.
30 September 2007
For all the grandeur of the event—the Orangerie at Versailles at night; the reunion of supermodel notables, from Linda, Naomi, Amber, and Shalom to Gisele on the runway—Dior's 60th anniversary collection had something elegiac about it. John Galliano drew romance and delicacy, rather than his more familiar roaring theatrics, out of a show ostensibly inspired by painters, fashion illustrators, and photographers. In fact, the underlying mood was of respectful homage to two men who devoted their lives to fashion and died too young: Christian Dior himself and Galliano's chief designer, Steven Robinson, who tragically passed away in April while working toward this collection.A celebration of the achievements of Dior could only open with a redrawn memory of the 1947 New Look, the wasp-waisted, full-skirted silhouette that revolutionized the way women dressed after World War II. Galliano approached it through the artistic landscape that formed Dior's imagination and the great talents who represented his work to the public in magazines. The opening sequence, led by Gisele Bündchen in a black "Bar" suit and Raquel Zimmermann in an ivory circle-skirted dress, caught the black-and-white drama of Irving Penn's photography and the dashed-off pen-and-ink drawings of Eric, Gruau, Bouche, Bérard, and Cocteau. Color came in gradually, first through a hand-tinted 3-D rose whorled center-front on a white bustier dress, then developing into extravagantly realized palettes taken from portraits of women by the Impressionists, Dutch masters, Pre-Raphaelites, and the greats of the Spanish school.Those color effects were ravishing. Running from the palest pinks through mauve, ice blue, crimson, orange, and emerald, they often appeared to shade from one hue to another in the rich folds of duchesse satin skirts and the tiny-bodiced jackets sitting above them. But if the exquisitely painted ladies made a wondrous display of the arts of the Dior atelier, there was another insistent subtheme rising through the show that put Galliano's personal stamp on the collection he has been orchestrating for ten years. For those who know his Spanish background, the clue was in the flamenco music and the passage of silhouettes drawn from Goya and Zurbarán, as if he had reached back to his roots for courage, as well as technical inspiration.
At the end, when he came out costumed like a fight-hardened matador strolling the ring, it seemed less like his usual jokey posturing than an emotional statement.
1 July 2007
With Penélope Cruz, Charlize Theron, and Dita Von Teese looking on, John Galliano sent out a resort collection that rivaled his latest couture and ready-to-wear extravaganzas—if not in terms of their super-ambitious New Look-meets-the Orient references, then certainly in terms of sequins. In so doing, he once again raised the bar for a season that just a few years ago was strictly a showroom affair with B-list models and tossed-off clothes—and for an industry compelled to reinvent itself in the face of globalism and global warming.Working in an electric-bright palette not unlike the one he used in his recent 1940's romp, Galliano shifted forward a couple of decades and channeled Barbara Hutton's sixties—a glittery, lamé, paisley, and leopard-print world of muumuus, bikinis, capri pants, trapeze dresses, cat-eye sunglasses, and scarf-wrapped hats. It bordered on camp, especially when one model, in sky-high heels with a cluster of logic-defying half spheres on the soles, had to be escorted down the runway. Kitschy or not, there was no denying the workmanship that went into crafting the large collection. And taken apart, there were some pieces that will mix convincingly into modern wardrobes—a lime-green chiffon gown with cascades of fluttering ruffles twisting around the body was Galliano at his languid best. Overall, the designer—despite the recent loss of his right-hand man, Steven Robinson—is in exuberant mode, which is how many in the crowd at 7 World Trade Center love him. As one prominent retailer put it on his way out, "If it's shiny, we like it."
13 May 2007
If you're getting into the forties this season (and that's definitely one way to go), John Galliano is the man to fulfill those latent Joan Crawford urges, no holds barred. His ready-to-wear collection for Christian Dior was virtually a camp-fabulous Hollywood spectacular—like a pumped-up 2007 remake ofThe Women(Cukor, 1939; ever a fashion favorite), but this time played out in full glorious purple, pistachio, electric blue, and fuchsia, rather than black and white.As a comeback from last season's comparatively muted collection, this was Galliano performing at full throttle, filling the runway with 58 girls dressed, as grandma would say, to the nines. Partly, it was an homage to Dior—the dove-gray runway, the banked flowers, and the balustraded staircase—and partly it was, as the French rather awkwardly translate it, a collection "declined" from Galliano's triumphant Madame Butterfly haute couture collection for Spring. To "decline," in fashion-Franglais, means to take the wildly expensive handcrafted fantasies of couture and turn them into factory-produced lookie-likeys. Sometimes "declension" (here and elsewhere) can actually lead to decline—i.e., disappointing commercial husks of the original thought. But now, in a flurry of energy and application, Galliano has upped the ante for Dior, reproducing believably close simulacra of such details as the origami-folding (see the suit pockets) and shortened versions of the multitiered ruffled skirts seen in his couture.There was showiness and chic in this. The python jackets and ostrich swing coats with sleeves built out in fox were the declarative side, but a sensuous womanliness came through, too. Galliano's draping, ingeniously wrapped to the hip in a purple skirtsuit and a chartreuse day dress, or deployed as one-shouldered asymmetries and sashes for cocktail and evening, created husband-hunting outfits of a type guaranteed to net results, be it 1947 or 2007.
26 February 2007
What psychological process did it take to lift John Galliano to the extraordinary place of brilliance he reached—or rather, rediscovered—in his Spring couture? Everything about the Dior collection—inspired, he said, "by Pinkerton's affair with Cio-Cio San, Madame Butterfly"—reconfirmed his unique talent to evoke beauty, sensitivity, narrative, and emotion in a fashion show. Kimonos, obis, and geisha makeup were Dior-ified, transformed into delicate translations of New Look peplum suits and full-skirted dance dresses. Each look sprouted yet more miraculous planes of origami folding, their stiff geometries creating necklines like flowers or hovering birds. Every dress had an intense color and character of its own; a hot pink, an eau-de-nil with coral, cascading shades of burgundy and imperial purple. Some were painted, others sculpted from curviform furls of woven straw.This was a return to form, and then some: a collection that represented a comprehensive ditching of the techno-brashness, crude drag-queen posturings, and overdone multireferencing that had come to obscure Galliano's talent in an increasingly bewildering way. Whatever caused this turnaround—the bleak sense of withdrawal of his last ready-to-wear collection puts it in particularly sharp relief—the recovery has been spectacular. Giant gray House of Dior chairs set on a series of podiums helped rekindle the magic of those delightful nineties shows in which Shalom Harlow and her friends used to method-model their way up and down Galliano's catwalks. And lo! There was Harlow herself, the bride, sprigs of diamonds atremble in her geisha hairdo.For anyone who first glimpsed Galliano's raw, romantic genius 20 years ago, or witnessed the impact of his first, all-black Japanese collection done on a shoestring a decade ago, today's presentation recaptured everything that ever made him a force to be reckoned with. Was it anything new? No. But when Galliano does what he does this brilliantly, there's no one who can touch him.
21 January 2007
The pattern of runway events at Christian Dior is forming a kind of paradigm of what fashion, and its marketing, are about now. As a designer at one of the most powerful houses in the world, John Galliano must address multiple global audiences, with the tiny core of fashion-hungry critics at one end and a vast potential public of women who are looking for something to wear at the other. So this is how it pans out: The idea-fueled Dior mania is sectioned off for couture, while ready-to-wear strikes up a conversation directly with the customer.That explains the settled-down atmosphere on the spring runway. This was a collection that spanned sensible gray Dior skirt-suits through wearably pretty dresses, with plenty of the obligatory, all-important, and this season gimmick-free chain-handled handbags. The soft, drapey, asymmetric necklined dresses, sprinkled with silver chain or tendrils of gold embroidery, ran through short to gown-length options in the prevailing spectrum of barely-there flesh tones. None of this generated the kind of news to put the fashion pack on trend alert, but it did carry the Galliano stamp in the armor detailing of the suits (translated from last couture) and in the signature drift of his dresses. That placed Dior firmly in the business-like arena of appropriately of-the-moment dressing, a zone an established Parisian label like this has every right to occupy. For the next creative surge forward, watch January's couture.
2 October 2006
Let us not be so prosaic as to ask exactly what Joan of Arc, Siouxsie Sioux, Botticelli, and the forties French film actress Arletty may have to do with one another—we've arrived in the parallel universe known as John Galliano's Christian Dior. So, on with the show! It¿s a parade of medieval warrior-women in gilded chain mail, copper verdigris gowns, and glass diadems, each equipped with an armored sleeve. It's a bizarre troupe of goth-punks in outsize black-and-red folded 3-D shapes fashioned from trash-bag plastic. It's a mincing line of forties ladies in pea-green and magenta doublet-jacketed crepe suits sporting lobster parts for hats. And then it's a perambulating collection of Tuscan topiary, with pennants and trumpets poking out atop.All this—and, be assured, there was more—played out against the backdrop of a Renaissance garden underneath a sky that alternated between blood-red storm clouds and a spinning astrological wheel taken from an illuminated manuscript. Such historicist games, richly yet randomly referenced, are, of course, part of the perverse delight of any John Galliano presentation. This season, the connecting threads of his allusions even managed to make sense in places. He refined the dark-ages militarism that appeared earlier on Dior's ready-to-wear runway, explored the parallels between doublet and hose and tunics and leggings, and hinted at a surrealist subtext that seems a pretty apt response to the here and now. Between the theatrics, there were also some amazingly covetable draped gowns in sugarplum, white, and peach. These showed up just before the finale: Galliano dropping in to take his bow, dressed as a spaceman.
4 July 2006
With Spike Lee, Harvey Weinstein, and Axl Rose watching from the front row, John Galliano presented his Dior cruise collection in New York City for the first time Tuesday night. And if there was any confusion about the newfound importance of this once-insignificant season, the celebrities, the pink champagne, and the sweeping views of 57th Street through the glass walls of the LVMH Tower Magic Room—not to mention the posh private dinner at the Four Seasons that followed—dispelled it. "We're pressured by our customers to show more and more in advance, because of our success here in the U.S.," said LVMH Chairman Bernard Arnault post show. "John responded with a mix of creativity and modernity."In this case, modernity unequivocally meant wearability. The models' cropped, punkish wigs notwithstanding, the runway theatrics Galliano regularly produces for Dior's couture and ready-to-wear shows were replaced here by a lineup of clean, easy pieces cut in innovative fabrics. Pea jackets and trenches came in laminated cottons, while skirts—pleated or pencil—and sexy, super-skinny pants were shown in metallic linens that caught the light. A fur made from strips of mink spliced with net and paillettes topped a cocktail dress, the hem of which was edged with sequins that echoed the skyline silhouetted outside.Where separates were mostly pared-down, evening numbers featured elaborate cuts and draping. Paradoxically, the latter had the more relaxed effect. One chiffon frock was suspended from a single brushed-metal shoulder strap that also appeared as bracelets on clutch bags, and a lamé minidress complete with a built-in hoodie seemed designed for Dior's youngest followers. For those hungering after a flash of Galliano's signature extravagance, it came at the finale: a pale mint deshabille gown of chiffon and taffeta that billowed like the most exuberant of his couture creations.
15 May 2006
Kerrang! The Christian Dior woman has turned into a goth-metal rock chick, all black bandana, major shades, fur-sprouting distressed leathers and stompin' medieval biker boots. With Pat Benatar and Bon Jovi on the soundtrack, and a front row that included Kate Hudson and Black Crowes hubby Chris Robinson, John Galliano turned the ultra-establishment Grand Palais de Paris into a fashion-rock stadium for the night. (Well, 20 minutes of it).For anyone with an eye for recent history, this was Galliano up to familiar tricks. The identically wigged, long-haired rocker women on the runway were—stylistically at least—slightly more contemporary sisters to the blood-spattered nineteenth-century zealots who appeared in Dior's French Revolutionary haute couture show for spring. This fall collection made the trickle-down effect from fantasy to nuts-and-bolts ready-to-wear more understandable than in seasons past. Galliano's voluminous, floor-sweeping coats with huge, shaggy goat-hair tufts escaping from their seams, and his neat jackets, decorated with vertical strips of fur, will translate into plenty of sellable pieces for the boutiques of the world to carry.More surprisingly, but just as cleverly, Galliano also slipped in references to Christian Dior's 1947 New Look jacket—here in a peplumed shape, or covered with tulle in the front. Those suits, with their artfully tattered and embroidered surfaces and second-skin pencil skirts, have a certain delicacy that is guaranteed to register with the more hyper-feminine Dior customer Galliano knows so well. Oddly enough, they also made a connection with the eighties power suit; a look that is preoccupying the young—and the not-so-young—on Planet Fashion this season.
27 February 2006
When John Galliano was traveling south to research his couture collection last summer, young men were rioting in the streets of France. That, at least in part, was one of the resonances that fed into the French Revolutionary, blood- and gore-spattered drama he put on at Christian Dior. Clad in huge red capes, cinched-in rough leather jackets, vast looped-up pannier skirts, laced biker pants, and shroudlike bindings, his models came out with their crucifix-festooned necks stenciled with the date of the revolution: 1789.“There was a lot of political unrest happening,” Galliano said of France's turbulent summer. “I wanted something bolder and toughened up. The beat of what's going on.” Still, this was hardly a manifesto for the overthrow of French society—or of Christian Dior—as we know it. During his research, which centered on Marseille and Arles, the designer went back to the corset factory Dior himself used in the 1950's, as well as to the home of Marie-Laure de Noailles (who he was delighted to discover was related to the Marquis de Sade). Down south, he also connected with “the passion of the bullfight,” which stirred up his Spanish blood. Somehow, it all came together in typical Galliano fashion: a delirium of perversely merged imagery held together by his signature nipped-waist, skirts-out-to-there silhouette. In the end, he twisted the principle oflibertéinto something deeply personal: a celebration of creative freedom with lashings of erotic libertinism thrown into the mix (thanks, naturally, go to his boss, Bernard Arnault, for funding the above). In a final display of the epic ego that drives it all, Galliano stormed the stage like a pirate, swishing a rapier.
22 January 2006
The setting and the preliminaries were more akin to a triumphal French state occasion than a fashion show, as a veritable who's who of Parisian society, gasping and gossiping, filed in to get their first look at the soaring nineteenth-century glass-and-steel splendor of the newly renovated Grand Palais. In a way, they had gathered there for a ritual steeped in a sense of national pride: the Christian Dior spring collection, an event garlanded with the kind of pomp and power only the French can bestow upon the business of fashion.Was that why John Galliano was on his best behavior? No silly pranks, breakneck platforms, scary makeup, or crazy, colliding references this season. Instead, what he proposed was a businesslike program for maximizing the potential of a single idea in his last couture collection: the black-lace-over-nude dress that Kate Moss wore this summer to the CFDA Awards.That one idea spun out through short dresses, drapier than the corseted original, and then in every possible garment and fabric treatment, from jackets and coats to jeans and, finally, a bustier bikini. Having wrung the last possible drop of inspiration out of the lace, Galliano moved on to big, bubbly organza blouses and to playing about with rainbows of degraded pinks—nude to fuchsia or nude to orange—to tinge the hems of short dresses and airy gowns and vary the monotony of all that flesh-colored floatiness.But of course, there was another unmissable footnote to this thoroughly commercial plan. That, of course, is the competition-whacking Dior saddle bag—now displaying a softness that cleverly demonstrates its ability to adapt to fashion's every twist and turn.
3 October 2005
A black-draped horse-drawn carriage arrived through the gates of a ruined Edwardian garden where cobwebs festooned broken statues, fallen chandeliers, and clumps of lily of the valley. Lo! It’s the ghost of Madame Dior arriving with her little sailor-suited boy, Christian, whose birthday fell 100 years ago.Thus John Galliano took the opportunity to revisit the rich and romantic story of the house he has inherited and reinvented for the twenty-first century. And for once, the narrative fantasist in him didn’t drive his horse and carriage down hard-to-follow byways or wildly irreverent culs-de-sac. Rather, the collection was transparently arranged as homage to Dior’s couture, from the fin-de-siècle influence of his mother’s gowns through the makings of the New Look, with walk-on parts for his workers, fashion editors, and the extraordinary roster of clients who flocked to him in the fifties.Transparency was the operative word. Almost everything from the Edwardian swagged and ruffleddos-devantgowns to the half-made, nipped-waist, full-skirt dresses was sheer, or constructed to look as if it were. For the most part, that brought a lightness—and delight—to shapes that in their original fabrics would seem unimaginably heavy today. Even Dior’s signature tweed suits were reincarnated in see-through organza, with scatterings of houndstooth checks embroidered in white beads.Galliano said he was inspired by how Dior’s creations were reflected in the work of Irving Penn, Cecil Beaton, Lillian Bassman, Christian Berard, and René Gruau. His merry dance whirled on images of Princess Margaret, Margot Fonteyn, Zizi Jeanmaire, and Wallis Simpson. After a detour into froufrou Peruvian costume, a visit to Hollywood brought on a heavily spangled lineup of old-time supermodels giving stately impersonations of Hayworth, Dietrich, de Havilland, and Bacall. In all, pure fashion entertainment. With only a few stumbles into screeching color combinations, it was a timely reminder of Galliano’s capacity for the delicate and poetic, as well as a reaffirmation of the incredible foundations of the House of Dior.
5 July 2005
John Galliano, subdued? Surely not. But it's true: A back-to-basics attitude is sweeping through the house of Dior. Abandoning the freaky makeup and vertiginous footwear of so many seasons past, Galliano turned his fall ready-to-wear show into an exhaustive commercial workout of his last couture collection—from the mod sixties vibe right through to the romantic Empire look.It started with black-and-white striped, laddered Edie Sedgwick mohair knits, worn with baker-boy caps, flat, pointy crocodile knee boots, and fishnets. Those quickly became a device for showing off the staple jackets Galliano has brought to the party: cutaway tail coats, biker jackets with Napoleonic collars, and his reinterpretation of Dior's seminal New Look Bar jacket. From there, he segued into shearling aviators, and brown crocodile and leather, sending out a high-belted maxi coat that knowingly checked another box on the season's trend sheet.Next up: gorgeous russet, dusty-pink, and burnt-orange velvets, followed by dresses in silver/gray, delicate pink, and grape, distilling the rococo delicacy of his couture into believable partywear. The remix heavily underscored the cash value of the wearable classics Galliano has added to the house's bottom line, which have been willfully obscured over years of apparently insane experimentation. So here, at last, is an accurate picture of Dior ready-to-wear. It is what it is; but we will have to wait for Galliano's next couture show to glimpse where it's going next.
28 February 2005
John Galliano produced an absolute dream collection at Christian Dior couture for spring—a dream that recaptured all the romantic, gasp-inducing poetry he used to infuse into his shows and that delivered everything, from surpassing technique to a fresh proportion, that sends a fashion audience into a state of bliss. Gone were the flashing lights, ear-splitting music, and vertiginous runway. Gone, the stilted, masklike makeup, the outrageous costumes paraded on limb-threatening footwear. At last, Galliano has had the change of heart for which his critics have been praying. “In my quest to make a corporate image for Dior, I had become a bit predictable,” he said. “So I wanted to get off the podium, to be more exclusive and less MTV.”So instead of the runway, there was a set that recalled Andy Warhol’s Factory with a stack of TV monitors, a live band channeling the Velvet Underground and Marianne Faithfull, and the audience sitting in a bunch of old chairs scattered on moldy rugs. If the conceit—Edie Sedgwick meets the Empress Josephine—sounds no less nutty than the standard Galliano fantasy, this time the result was serenely grounded in beautiful clothing. Only Galliano could move from Edie’s black leotards and flat crocodile knee boots through striped paillette minidresses, peacoats, and mod caps to culminate—without a single stumble—in russet Empire-line velvet and ethereal Directoire ivory organza.But this was no literal historical recreation. The combination of flat pointed knee boots and raised-waist dresses amounts to a whole new proposition in silhouette and style. Add in the throwaway richness of the fabrics and colors—the threadbare red damasks and velvet, turned into sumptuous, puffy dresses and worn with Cavalier hats, or the delicately sumptuous embroideries on Napoleonic coats and Josephine gowns—and this is a collection with the power to reverberate throughout fashion for seasons to come.
23 January 2005
Screeeeech! John Galliano opened his Christian Dior show with the sound of a car revving up and driving off. Was this indicative of a gear change at the house of Dior? While there has been praise lavished on the feats of imagination Galliano conjures for couture, the ready-to-wear hasn't hit the mark, of late. Recent collections have featured some—or more likely all—of the following: rubber fetish suits under evening dresses, scarily high S&M platforms, and lamé rockabilly suits that looked made for a 400-pound Elvis impersonator, all topped off with makeup that was one part kabuki, one part Baby Jane Hudson.Galliano changed tactics this season. This collection was a riposte to his critics: You want clothes? I'll give you clothes. And as if to underscore that his time at Dior has produced wearable pieces, he proceeded to revive most of them. There were the curvy suits, now recast in bouclé and denim, the Indian-embroidered bloused minidresses, the Tibetan fur vests, the anime/cartoon Dior-logo tees, and multiple variations on his trademark fluttery bias-cut dresses. And not one of the bags he showed with each and every look really stood out. Most looked mundane, minor reworkings of Dior's famous saddle style. In the end, this retrospective simply became retro—a mish-mash mix of old references masquerading as something new.It's never easy to walk the line between runway and reality. Too much of the former and you're living in a dream world; too much of the latter and what's on the catwalk registers as routine. Galliano has navigated beautifully between those two territories before. He needs to do so again—otherwise he's simply speeding along on the road to nowhere.
4 October 2004
Imagine a stately parade of Austro-Hungarian fin-de-siècle princesses, competing with one another for precedence in outrageously ornate corseted gowns, their crowns slightly askew. Tottering under the weight of pounds of elaborate fabric, skirt flounces the width of the runway, bank vaults of jewelry, and 6-inch platforms, Christian Dior’s models pulled off a spectacle that held the audience breathless in case someone fell. So vast and encased were the frocks that at one point, Karolina Kurkova actually got stuck in the exit and had to be manhandled off.“I went on a research trip to Vienna, and then got to looking at Egon Schiele, and Empress Sisi, and Russia!” was John Galliano’s explanation. Strangely, in spite of the mind-blowing succession of hobbled, hourglass silhouettes, blown up with massive outcrops of Edwardian swags and drapes and gigantic fur-trimmed opera coats, this was a pared-down Dior Couture in several senses. Galliano ditched the Leigh Bowery/kabuki makeup in favor of powdered faces, and the dresses, for all their rich embroidery, crystal chunks, and hand-painted cherubs and birds, gave a new sense of the body beneath.In that way, it was easier to make the imaginative leap from runway to real event (perhaps one of those royal weddings that have enthralled Europe this summer?) than was usual in previous Dior Couture extravaganzas. This show also made a heady, sensuous display of color—brick red, emerald, celadon,boie de rose, and more—and an opulent celebration of couture-crafted textures, often enhanced to look as if the girls were actually wearing the gilded upholstery and painted ceilings of an imperial palace. On the other hand, it was also essentially a show of one queenly message, repeated 28 times. And that, for Galliano, displayed an odd lack of variety.
5 July 2004
John Galliano has already proved how far he can push it with iconoclastic delirium at Christian Dior. Making over the staid old "madam" house to become a global, cash-creating engine for bags, perfume, cosmetics: Done. Faces painted in exaggerated theatrical/clown/kabuki masks: Done. Showing an over-exaggerated version of what will appear in stores? Seen and understood.Galliano was up to his old merge-meister devices again for fall. The collection, he explained, was inspired by illustratedVoguecovers from the 1900s, using them as a route through to the Edwardiana/teddy boy revival of the 1950s. What that basically boiled down to was introducing humongous, Poiret-style fur-collared coats into the rockabilly canon of neon leopard spot, vast Elvis-does-Vegas lamé draped jackets, and 4-inch crepe-soled brothel creepers. It was, as usual, taken to the absolute theatrical max—which produced only an exhausted sense of been there, done that.There were, among all this, some of the pretty, fragile evening dresses that Galliano confects so well: one in ice blue, sheathed in silver sparkles, another in eau de nil frilled with watery chiffon. Lovely—but these, too, now have the inevitable feel of a design sensibility set to autopilot. Fashion, especially now, needs to be astonished by new approaches to creating beauty for modern times. In the fall 1994 collection that won him his deserved place in the Parisian establishment, a pre-Dior Galliano proved himself prodigiously capable of that with only a few yards of black silk. If he could retrieve his sense of that dreamy simplicity, it would count for more than all the cacophonous entertainment he lays on now.
2 March 2004
Just asking: which contemporary designer researched his latest collection while floating half-a-mile high in a hot-air balloon? The answer, of course, is John Galliano, whose Dior couture show was inspired by an aerial tour of Egypt that included the Valley of the Kings, Cairo, Aswan, and Luxor. The result was a gilded fantasia that used every treasure available to the couture ateliers—gold leaf, lapis lazuli–hued snake, silver lamé, coral beading—to reference everything from Nefertiti and King Tut to hieroglyphs and tomb paintings.Beginning with Erin O’Connor, resplendent in a gold outfit with massively overblown cuffs, painted face, and a huge empress headdress, Galliano worked what he called “the sphinx line: elongated, tight, attenuated, but crossed with the elegance of Avedon and Penn.” His suits were as fitted as sarcophagi. Peplum jackets and long, narrow skirts encased the body from neck to floor in sumptuous metallics, as the models walked like Dior Egyptians—tiny, hobbled steps, hips thrust dramatically forward. Monumental, crystal-encrusted jewelry was fashioned in the shape of scarabs and eagles.Now a Galliano girl loves nothing more than an excuse to get down to her glamorous underwear, which, when you’re a chic mummy, means a lovely winding of bandages. That is the curious provenance of one of the show’s prettiest dresses, done in lashed-around strips of white chiffon and studded with crystal. From there the designer loosened up the queenly parade, releasing the skirts into volumes that vaguely recall Christian Dior’s original New Look. Judging by the awed reactions of such audience members as Sarah Jessica Parker and Gwen Stefani, the collection will prove a trove of delights into which contemporary Cleopatras will be more than happy to dig.
18 January 2004
John Galliano didn’t go on one of his extensive research trips to come up with the Christian Dior concept for spring; perhaps he just popped across Paris to an exhibition of Marlene Dietrich’s clothes that ran this summer. “It was Marlene,” explained the designer. “But then I thought, who would she be today? Marianne Faithfull, Janis Joplin, Courtney Love, Patti Smith!”Marlene was clearly behind his opening series of curvy gunmetal satin suits with a forties air; the fox-fur jackets that swanked through the show; and the beautiful bias-cut dresses, in silver or gold lamé tissue, that starred towards the end. In between, Galliano mixed up her influence with tattoo-print body stockings, suits with pieces of corsets and garters dangling from the skirt and jacket hems, and some hip-hop–influenced silk sportswear. There were enough items in the melee to satisfy the faithful: his signature print chiffon dresses, some ultra-sexy swimsuits, and the new twist on the Dior bag (it comes with a fox stole attached to the strap). But anyone looking for Galliano’s next great leap forward will have to wait till next season.
7 October 2003
“You should be dancing. Yeah!” Before his Dior Couture show began, John Galliano treated his audience to an ear-blasting soundtrack of the Bee Gees’ greatest hits. It was an appropriate and uplifting intro to an exuberant performance that opened with a group of fiery flamenco gypsies, stamping the runway in flounced skirts, corsetry, and wickedly mannish, form-swathing jackets, their eyes flashing and matches clamped between their teeth. The collection, which has turned into a kind of fashion travelogue over the past few seasons, turned out to be a journey through dance culture, taking in tango, Charleston, ballet, cha-cha, cancan, hip-hop, raga, and acid house along the way.In another sense, this was a return trip to Galliano’s roots: luxuriating in cross-references while showing off a unique talent for feisty femininity. He pitched leotards, legwarmers, track jackets, and track pants into a layered mêlée of beautiful dresses that exploded with ballroom ruffles, shot out in tulleSwan Lakeskirts, or shimmied in liquid-silver lamé. A flapper came on wearing an exquisitely fragile embroidered petal dress; a Theda Bara look-alike vamped in fringe, only to be upstaged by a Crazy Horse showgirl in spangles and a towering pink ostrich headdress. And so it went: a multicolor, neon-print extravaganza that, refreshingly, didn’t stumble into seven-inch platforms, scary faces, or abstract overkill.It seemed like Galliano’s most heartfelt Dior show in a long while, and for good reason. The designer said afterward that it was an homage to his Gibraltarian father, who passed away last week. “We danced flamenco at his funeral,” the designer confided. “It’s important to remember where we come from.” In more ways than one, this collection was a life-affirming celebration of all Galliano holds dear.
6 July 2003
Only one man on earth could possibly whip up a collection of fetish queens in Kabuki face paint, going crazy in multicolor Asian-slash-eighteenth-century clothes. Hello, John Galliano! Up to his canny method madness at Christian Dior yet again.“It was hard-core romance! Sex robots!” was the sound bite Galliano delivered backstage to describe his ready-to-wear version of the conceptual mayhem he wreaked at Dior’s couture collection in January. Back then he’d just come back from a trip to China and Japan, scandalizing many critics with the extra-outsize scale of his box-shaped, 3-D cutting experiments and mind-blowing kaleidoscope of East-West references.But now we see how it all trickles down to the level of wearable, wantable clothes. Take a pink, crystal-embroidered duchesse-satin coat, extravagantly ruffled with layers of organza, or a fragile chiffon dress patterned in mint, yellow and magenta—who wouldn’t? Rubber leggings, cross-laced up the front, came with a peach-colored, gold-embroidered satin jacket, edged with a multilayer explosion of organza ruffles. A massive fur in three shades of lilac rode on a tiny, slinky minidress. The stripes and numbers of football jerseys got thrown onto wispy chiffon; the black-and-white fish prints from Chinese kites were dramatized into voluminous gowns. This was a collection studded with innumerable delicate, richly beautiful pieces.Above all, the wearability factor is proven by Dior’s results. For those turned on by financials, the house just announced operating profits of $36 million for the last season. Meanwhile, Galliano fanatic Gwen Stefani displayed her own enthusiasm for the Dior bottom line. “Just how do I get my ass into that rubber skirt?” she wanted to know.
5 March 2003
It was Asia, but not as we know it. Recently returned from a three-week trip to China and Japan, John Galliano staged a Christian Dior couture show that smashed cultural boundaries in a spectacle of gargantuan theatricality. Sweeping, multicolored volumes of fabric that mixed East and West, ancient and modern, were showcased amid appearances from Chinese dancers and circus performers, who flew along the runway in death-defying feats of athleticism.In Galliano’s hands, the vivid colors and patterns of Chinese costume and Japanese kimonos got transformed into some of thehugestclothes ever invented. Models, almost completely submerged in cocooning swaths of brocade, taffeta and exploding chiffon flounces, teetered along on vertiginous platforms. Mixed up in the melee were pastel-colored marabou feathers—Galliano’s homage to England’s Queen Mother—18th-century hoopskirts and deliberately sleazy vinyl (just to add a contradictory jolt of modernity).Galliano used the termhard-core romanceto describe this new passion for volume and sensational celebration of color (running in every hue from sugared pastels to intense bolts of orange, turquoise and red). But we’ll have to wait for Dior’s ready-to-wear collection to see how the man plans to make it all wearable.
19 January 2003
The method to John Galliano’s Dior madness is no longer in debate. The designer has re-branded the legendary Parisian house via high-octane couture shows that broach the wilder shores of creativity and are then filtered down to instantly recognizable ready-to-wear pieces for Christian Dior addicts.Galliano’s spring show stayed true to his now well-established formula, as slinky cargo pants, fanny-hugging mini parachute dresses with voluminous tops, Hollywood-showgirl frocks and amped-up bikinis rolled effortlessly off the production line. He displayed accessible versions of the gargantuan leather jackets, strap-bound leather tubes and plunging goddess dresses that appeared in his July couture show, sending a current of new fluorescents, khakis and metallics down the runway.There were some pulse-racing moments—the loud little Dior-printed dresses and a sexy gold bikini with a touch of screen-siren ruching in the bra—and some change in direction, as ethnic references were discarded in favor of all-out glamour. But there is now a sense of familiarity to this process and a feeling that Galliano’s poetry is getting lost in the machine.
2 October 2002
Bring back glamour! That’s the message John Galliano unleashed at Dior couture, in a collection that had models powering along the runway in ultra-high platforms, tight hobble skirts, massive coats and parkas, impossibly skimpy showgirl dresses and hugely extravagant feathered headdresses culled from the glory years of Hollywood.The hallucinogenic mix came out of Galliano’s American road trip, which took him and his jolly band of accomplices through Los Angeles and Mexico earlier this year. They ransacked movie studio archives for the costumes of Theda Bara and Marlene Dietrich, and even created a runway replica of the legendary subway grating over which Marilyn Monroe cooled her hot bod inThe Seven Year Itch.Galliano said that after then loading up on Mexican religious imagery, “We came back and thought, how would Kate Moss wear this? To me, she’s today’s equivalent of the great Hollywood glamour icons.” Perhaps that accounted for the titanium bosoms and pregnant bellies some of the models were wearing. In any case, with the ostrich feathers and coyote fur flying, and the London Community Gospel Choir singing, this was a multi-everything spectacle, devised to edge Dior into a new phase of Galliano’s master plan.“We’ve deconstructed Dior, now’s the time to reconstruct, but in a different way,” the designer declared. “Couture can be so heavy, but now we’ve constructed everything on foam, so it’s light as air.”
7 July 2002
Given John Galliano's track record of whizzing an overload of a trillion colors and cultural references past his bedazzled Dior audience, it hardly seems possible to say he's settling down. But this fall collection is almost classic in its Dior-isms containing all the patterns, symbols and accessories on which Galliano has re-built the house foundations. That means ethnic color and print, love of the eighteenth century, an obsession with bias-cut dresses, a "sauvage" method of cutting all his own—and, of course, the constantly updated Dior saddlebags.Galliano's girls stormed out in Peruvian knitted hats sprouting huge Mohawks, their feet bound up in fur moccasin-boots. The clothes were sexily recut from a haul of Indian, South American, Mongolian and Tibetan materials. Flouncy skirts edged in gold Indian print sometimes with bells around the hem, Indian mirrored and gold embroidery, Hungarian rose folk prints, lacquered leather paisley and Chinese quilting—they were all there in a breathless melee. Standouts were the ruffled skirts with their gilded edges, and a patchwork inside-out fur with huge shoulders, painted to run from rose red through orange on the outside.This season's saddlebag update—fresh accessories being a crucial part of every designer business—is oversized and done in patchwork suede and fur. As a nod to Christian Dior heritage, Galliano threw in some 1940s coats worn with round-toed pumps and woolly knee socks. But we hardly need the "roots" reminders these days. Galliano has so thoroughly remade the house in his own image, who cares?
6 March 2002
John Galliano proved last night that modern couture is alive and kicking with an adrenaline hit of sheer energy inspired by almost every aspect of Russian art and culture: circus, ballet, theater, art, literature and costume.Galliano scrambled these elements together to forge a new and uncompromising vision. A khaki blouson was embroidered with Mongolian rosettes and worn with a box-bleated minitoga. A square-shouldered warrior coat in striped ticking, worn with a circular skirt, featured knife-pleated floral insets. A long, peplum-waisted military jacket was smothered in golden bows and paillettes, and worn over a slightly bustled long brocade skirt.Set to the booming drum beats of near-naked Japanese Kodo musicians sampling ’80s hits by Bow Wow Wow and Adam Ant, the Dior show had the allure of a magical circus parade. A floor-length paneled coat incorporated denim, gold brocade, Mongolian lamb and matelassé silk, capped with gold fringe epaulettes. Dancers pliéd out in tutus made from denim taffeta and fur, or curlicue rattan ribbons. The contortionists wore black sequined shorts. And everyone looked thoroughly, defiantly, alive.
20 January 2002
John Galliano’s “Street Chic” collection took the form of a virtual world tour, with stops that included lavishly clad Bedouins, army recruits and girls in the ’hood.This was not the first time Dior has gone globetrotting, but Galliano injected, as always, new energy into his ethnic excursions. His bias-cut silk and lace dresses, embroidered jackets and sheer tops will work better than ever in this season of unbridled romanticism. Python jackets and low-slung hip-hop jeans also seem right for the moment, while the more eye-popping pieces—like the glittering pantsuit embroidered with kitschy Americana motifs—are just the thing for a starlet’s weekend jaunt to Vegas.Galliano also showed a series of great-looking patchwork and Mexican serape-print bathing suits, embellished with utilitarian canvas straps.
8 October 2001
The Parisian skies may have been gray and overcast for the opening of couture week, but there wasn't the faintest trace of a cloud over Christian Dior's magnificently colorful collection. John Galliano, a master at cross-referencing diverse cultures and time periods, was in top form this season with his Middle Eastern, Indian and Himalayan extravagance.With a string orchestra from the National Opera of Paris playing live in the background, a defiant troop of militants took to the stage wearing stern military jackets, embroidered lace dresses, chic djellabas, hooded tunics and Palestinian-inspired shirts. "I put an emphasis on separates, treating couture like you would sportswear," said Galliano. His chic rebels next embarked on a virtual jaunt to Goa, donning feather-light "peace and love" tie-dye and rainbow dresses embellished with acid butterflies, cartoon characters, smiley faces, and tongue-in-cheek messages like "Trance" and "X-ta-sea."For the grand finale, Galliano's psychedelic globetrotters sported sheepskin trenches, quilted patchwork coats, silk kimonos, massive fur boots, and a variety of asymmetric, distressed suedes and leathers. "I call it Barbie Goes to Tibet," said the designer of his eclectic sartorial cocktail. Uplifting and exuberant, the Dior show proved that fun and serious fashion are not incompatible. "All the ethnic research was great inspiration," said Galliano. "But ultimately, the collection is about the lyricism of fabrics and clothes."
6 July 2001
Having thoroughly exhausted the minutiae of white-trash glamour, John Galliano turned to global ravers, fabulous hip-hop queens and Irish-gypsy boxers à la Brad Pitt's character inSnatchfor inspiration.Sound confusing? Relax. Call it what you will, Galliano delivered some of the most relevant clothes Dior has seen in seasons. Pinstripe suits with leather and flower-print front plackets, neo-dandy check blazers, leather overcoats, rakish hats, and colorful foulards and ties all gave Dior a new—and commercially rewarding—dimension. “Boom box” bags, large circular cases, denim saddle totes and metallic lunchboxes will also keep cash registers busy at Dior boutiques worldwide.That's not to say that Galliano was denied his fun. Witness his holographic silver jackets, ghetto-blaster graffiti ensembles, unlined, zigzag chinchillas and shiny patent blousons. In lesser hands the whirlpool of references would've fizzled out, but Galliano's thuggish suits, fandango skirts, gypsy-hippie dresses, patchwork coats, and boxing robes and trousers all worked wonderfully.
12 March 2001
“Daughter, rouse yourself! Burst your bonds of mind and body!” read a ’50s Wonder Woman cartoon strip by William Moulton Marston that was tacked onto John Galliano’s inspiration board at Dior. “Marston laid out much of the groundwork for modern feminism,” said Galliano, explaining his current obsession with the all-American superheroine.That obsession led to a visual history of comic-book liberation. “The show opening is about repressed postwar women,” he added of the bespectacled,Pleasantville-inspired bookworms who populate the show’s first few exits. “But through the clothes you can see hints of the liberated women they will become.” Next came Galliano’s rendition of Eisenhower-era suburbia: martini-marinated ladies lost in giant Empire-waist tulle confections embroidered with Brillo pads, teacups and other household items. (Nutty, to be sure, but the frilly gowns, ordered sans decoration, will make lovely wedding gowns for a resourceful few.)When dowdy Diana Prince finally becomes Wonder Woman, she does so, according to Galliano, with all the verve of a demented heavy-metal cheerleader, replete with slashed concert gear.The story concludes with Wonder Woman retiring to her birthplace, Paradise Island, where only women are allowed—and where one can enjoy the sun in ravaged Grecian dresses, ancient bits of fur and dustyMad Maxboots.True, most socialites won’t want to attend a Metropolitan Opera gala wearing a golden corset and a Lasso of Truth. But couture is as much about creative flights of fancy as it is about the customer—and thankfully, Galliano can always be counted on to deliver something a good deal more entertaining than perfectly cut chiffon.
21 January 2001
Highbrow eyebrows were raised from the very beginning of John Galliano’s outrageous presentation for Dior, as a sexy blaring soundtrack introduced a cavalcade of tough babes in patchwork wrapped skirts, sequined, pinned and frayed jackets, rough leather belts, vice squad-defiant heels and pop-colored fishnet stockings.Classic Galliano motifs—newspaper-print tops, recycled and reconfigured jeans, hard-core leather straps and zippered motorcycle jackets—were thrown together with new creations like a bag that evoked a classic ’50s car (complete with door-handle clasp), sporty blousons with racing stripes, a bright yellow life-vest jacket and ruffled, hooded windbreakers. A contest of camouflage, leopard- and leather-trimmed bikinis segued into an array of ravaged prom queens who had clearly had too many drinks (not to mention a pill or two or three) the night before. But even the vampiest gals need a touch of class, so Galliano signed several looks (including lace-front dresses that surreptitiously morphed into trousers) with Dior mementos from the past: Miss Dior, Dior, J'Adore and Diorissimo.Destruction, reconstruction, punk, recycling, tiaras, sex, patchwork, saddles, logos, commerce, camouflage, street, diffusion, vintage cars…only Galliano could pull it off.
9 October 2000
This show, coming six months afterJohn Galliano’s controversial Hobo couture collection forDior, opened with a posh wedding, but it was only nominally about love. Galliano used the runway as a platform to explore sex and fetishism. He also indulged his love of costume; following the bridal party down the catwalk was a cast of characters that included a French maid with a hickey, a bleeding Marie Antoinette, a sadistic priest, a showgirl with a gorilla mask, and a truly scary clown, among plenty of others. This was no ordinary dress-up game, though, as the clothes exhibited the exquisite craftsmanship of Dior’spetites mains.
8 July 2000
"Welcome to all our Super Fly Girls," read the models' upbeat cue-card backstage at the House of Dior's latest extravaganza. After the furor over his last Dior "hobo" couture collection, designer John Galliano crowded the mirrored runway with throwaway luxe outfits that took a leaf—make that a volume or two—from the opulent style manuals of the contemporary rap world. The fur was flying: Chunky sable and chinchilla coats, and even a sheared mink trench, were shrugged over barely there boudoir chiffon dresses (some suspended from thick gold chains). Even Galliano's thick knits were threaded with fur strips (and worn with '80s ostrich-skin skirts or skinny pants). When the fur wasn't real, it was printed--think faded animal spots on chiffon or beaded leopard pelts on stonewashed denim.The Christian Dior Daily,a newspaper created just for the show, was printed on chiffon, leather and even the reverse side of furs.The mood softened with perversely ragged dresses inspired by Galliano's couture collection, and a finale of miraculously cut black or lingerie-pink lace and chiffon dresses. These, with their deconstructed corset pieces cleverly built-in, and with sun-ray-pleat insets fanning into trains, hinted at the refined Galliano magic of yesteryear.
28 February 2000
Couture blaxploitation, logos-a-go-go, leather-clad revolutionaries, whip-toting modern courtesans—where else but at Dior? John Galliano's romp started with a series of wildly sexy denim looks reminiscent of a glammed-out Foxy Brown: knee-high lace-up logo boots, foulard tops made out of Dior's signature print, frayed microskirts and supersexy tan leather pants. Just when you were ready to call the vice squad, out came a parade of eighteenth-century-inspired white, black, and red corsets with lace-up skirts and leggings (asymmetrically cut and with plenty of zippers and laces, of course). Insouciant dance-hall girls in enormous coiffures, velvet ensembles, polka dots, deconstructed suede, whips and satin getups followed. It doesn't get much closer to the fantasy of couture than this—and nobody makes it more fun than Galliano.
4 October 1999
On “a runway paved with waterbed pillows” at the Orangeries in Versailles,John Gallianopresented an haute couture show for Dior that mixed futurism with historical and ethnic references. The team, reportedHamish Bowlesafter a preview, were “deeply inspired byThe Matrix, and they’ve also been thinking about Gainsborough in Persia and ‘Vishnu Knights.’ ” Said Galliano: “The dresses are evil, evil. But you have to have the Romantic—they die for that, my ladies.” After seeing the show, “one would have to wonder,” reported critic Cathy Horn, “whether Mr. Arnault had made a deal with the devil.”
19 July 1999
Editor’s Note: Vogue Runway is celebrating “the most wonderful time of the year” by adding six magical—and newly digitized—1990s haute couture shows to our archive. Christian Dior’s fall 1997 collection, designed by John Galliano, was originally presented on January 18, 1999, at the company headquarters on Avenue Montaigne in Paris.Surrealism was the inspiration for the Christian Dior spring 1999 couture lineup. It’s obvious how much John Galliano and his team enjoyed their research, as almost every aspect of the collection—from concept to clothing to set—is a reference to the movement. For starters, the torn paper “windows” through which the models appear seem to be borrowed from a 1936 Cecil Beaton shoot forVogue.Mona von Bismarck (Mrs. Harrison Williams), 1936.Photographed by Cecil Beaton,Vogue,October 1, 1936Galliano himself introduced the collection and its inspirations, calling out Jean Cocteau (whose line drawings were referenced in a trio of astrology-themed dresses) and Salvador Dalí, especially. Based on the AP report, the gender play in the collection (female models played male roles) was based on what the designer described as Dalí and wife Gala’s “powerplay for sexual dominance.” More interesting, perhaps, were the more direct nods to Dalí’s work in the eye pins and the glittering lobster attached to a dress strap, visual shout-outs both to the artist’sLobster Telephoneand the crustacean he painted on a dress at Elsa Schiaparelli’s request.The collection was ripe with such allusions: A purse pocket on a black suit nodded to Schiap; Jade Parfitt’s bangles resembled those in a famous Man Ray portrait of heiress Nancy Cunard; the models’ berets looked not unlike the ones worn by Renée Pearl, muse to Jacques-Henri Lartigue. And the list goes on.
21 January 1999