Dior’s dream dresses brought to life in Paris show-stopper
There’s a new show in town that elegantly dances round all the usual problems with fashion exhibitions. Result: one of the best I’ve ever seen. Most fashion exhibitions end up diminishing their subject. Clothes are not meant to be behind glass, trapped in lifeless limbo. If they ever come close to being art, it’s in partnership with the person wearing them. But the breadth, depth, verve and ambition of Dior, Couturier
des Rêves (designer of dreams) in Paris is dazzling.
However sceptical you feel about the increasing number of blockbuster museum events generously sponsored by their subjects, I challenge you to leave this one not just determined to be a little more elegant, but quite a bit more knowledgeable about social history. Sometimes it’s the almost casual asides in the captions to the many photographs accompanying the 300 outfits that reveal how much the world has changed in the 70 years since Dior unveiled his scandalous New Look.
There are the French housewives who, in 1947, attacked an early adopter in one of those 40 yard skirts, and physically tore off her clothes – a remarkable photo that shows, as much as anything, brutalisation of post-war Paris. Then again, the febrile mood that engulfed France during and immediately after the war played in Dior’s favour. How many designers genuinely shock today? He caused more ripples with the H Line in 1954, which – quelle horreur – flattened women’s curves and, according to its critics, eviscerated all the femininity the New Look had venerated. It was a harbinger of the decade to follow, but dismayed by the potential impact on his profits, Dior subsequently staged a photo shoot with the pneumatic Jane Russell dressed in a H Line to quell the alarm.
A prescient globalist, in the Fifties, Dior began designing separate collections for New York. Social media being confined to the telephone and telegram and the whole business of exporting being quite a palaver, the most straightforward option, even for a revered French couturier, was to cut a deal with a Manhattan department store and produce a few dozen outfits that could be made and sold exclusively in the US. He understood the power of cinema and dressed actresses in films by Truffaut, Buňuel, Godard… He was also tremendously pragmatic about whom he dressed. Eva Peron, wife of the Argentine military dictator? She was swathed in Dior judging by a portrait that shows her almost drowning in ruffles. South American women loved Dior and they had not only the cash, but the appetite for spending hours in a corset, whereas American women were discovering the freedom of sportswear.
By the late Fifties, following Dior’s premature death, the 21-year-old Yves Saint Laurent had taken over. He introduced patent leather biker jackets. Marc Bohan, his successor, steered Dior through two successful, if creatively unspectacular, decades. The lack of catwalk excitement didn’t matter: Grace of Monaco was a loyal fan. There’s a section of Princess gowns too – the house dressed Princess Margaret and Diana inter alia.
The suit died away. It was the Seventies. Ball gowns survived. Late Eighties Dior saw a wave of bravura flounces, courtesy of Gianfranco Ferre, who started as an architect but had the impulses of a grand opera producer. The theatrical phantasmagoria of John Galliano followed; then four years after the crash, the streamlined architecture of Raf Simons. Last year, Dior appointed Maria Grazia Chiuri, its first female creative director, who, like Dior, believed that fantasy and functionalism, softness and tailoring could happily coexist. All seven designers are represented in the exhibition, which favours themes and ideas above chronology and is all the more interesting for it. One startling triple decker vitrine illustrates the house’s love of black and white across the decades.
For today’s public, queasily conscious of its overconsumption but still in thrall to it, this is a lesson in how beautiful clothes can be enjoyed without being owned.
Dior, Couturier des
Rêves at Musée des Arts Décoratifs until Jan 7