London, Milan, Paris, New York ...Perthshire!
As the house of Dior prepares to descend on Scotland, how the king of couture himself was seduced by tartan, tweed and tiaras
ON A blustery morning in April 1955, a private plane emblazoned with the Air France logo landed at Renfrew airport with some particularly precious cargo.
On board were eight fashion models, six staff, 172 dresses, and the king of the Parisian couture world, Christian Dior. The reason for their trip? To stage two spectacular fashion shows in Scotland. One at Glasgow’s Central Hotel, the other in the grand ballroom of the Gleneagles Hotel.
It was an unexpected injection of glamour in a Scotland that was still recovering from the ravages of the Second World War and where rationing had ended just one year before.
Photographers clamoured to take pictures of the stunning models who disembarked from the plane, while crowds gathered outside the Glasgow hotel for a glimpse of the great designer himself. Tickets for both events – staged to raise money for charity – were sold out, while the dresses themselves were insured for £60,000, a huge sum at the time.
An invite was the hottest ticket not just in town, but across the country. So many dignitaries attended that the master of ceremonies began his announcement on the night with the words: ‘My Lord Provost, your Excellencies, your Grace, my lords, ladies and gentlemen...’.
Almost 70 years later, Dior is making a spectacular return to Perthshire. On June 3, the French fashion house will unveil its 2025 cruise collection in the grounds of Drummond Castle, a stone’s throw from the town of Crieff and just a few miles from Gleneagles.
And celebrities are likely to pour in for the show. Dior does, after all, have a track record of attracting A-listers to the brand: actresses Charlize Theron, Natalie Portman, Jennifer Lawrence and Cara Delevingne are all ‘spokeswomen’ for various Dior products.
Back in January, the fashion house’s last event played host to singer Rihanna and a brace of Hollywood actresses including Portman, Anya Taylor-Joy, Elizabeth Debicki, Glenn Close and Juliette Binoche. Meanwhile Ewan McGregor, a native of Crieff who bought a house in Perthshire last year and is married to actress Mary Elizabeth Winstead, is also likely to make the guest list.
A rumour doing the rounds in Crieff suggests Victoria Beckham, who recently celebrated her 50th birthday in some style, might also make an appearance, although as a fashion designer in her own right now, she may demur the invite.
Drummond Gardens, which opens to the public during the summer months, may seem an unlikely venue for a fashion show more likely to be found on the catwalks of Paris, but it is not the first time it has played host to the jet set.
Indeed, built in the 15th century as a fortified tower and renowned for its Renaissance-style garden, the castle, which boasts Italian architecture and French gardens, recently stood in for Versailles during an episode of US TV hit Outlander. Scenes for the film Rob Roy were also filmed there.
The Dior cruise collection – collection croisière in French – is a line of ready to wear travel outfits traditionally shown between the spring/summer and autumn/winter collections. Over the years the couturier has staged the show at locations including the Panathenaic Stadium in Athens, a canyon in California, and with flamenco dancers in Seville.
Last year’s Frida Kahlo-inspired collection was showcased in Mexico City at the college where the painter studied, and where guests included the singer Alicia Keys.
This year’s collection, presented by Dior’s head designer Maria Grazia Chiuri, has been rather grandly described as a ‘poetic invitation where past and future meet’.
It is likely to be inspired by Scotland’s landscape and the fashion house’s ties with the country. Not only did Christian Dior stage the two shows here in the 1950s, he also christened one of his first ever collections back in 1947 Écosse, after the French word for Scotland.
‘Dior has chosen the gardens of Drummond Castle, a historic architectural treasure, to reveal the silhouettes dreamed up by Maria Grazia Chiuri,’ said a Dior spokesman.
‘The founding-couturier named an emblematic haute couture ensemble Écosse. Such affinities were further affirmed during a sumptuous ball orchestrated at the Gleneagles Hotel for the spring-summer 1955 collection.
‘So many tributes to the beauty of journeys and cultures that this new cruise show will spotlight more than ever.’ Très bien. Past Dior collections have featured tweed, anoraks and work boots – the sort of outfits you’d see on Scottish estates – and it is a look that is having something of a cultural moment thanks to the rustic style of Claudia Winkleman on BBC hit show The Traitors, set in a castle near Inverness.
It is not the first time in recent memory that a French fashion house has decamped to the unlikely environs of rural Scotland.
In 2012 Chanel brought the Metiers d’Art show to the ruins of Linlithgow Palace near Edinburgh. Masterminded by the late Karl Lagerfeld, supermodels including Delevingne, Stella Tennant and Edie Campbell stomped down a catwalk encircled by baskets of fire wearing confections of tartan and tweed while bagpipers played and guests sipped hot ginger and whisky.
While the tropes may have appeared a little too on the nose for native Scots, then Vogue editor Alexandra Shulman pronounced it a ‘truly exceptional show’. Linlithgow locals meanwhile were disappointed when rumoured attendees, Hollywood A-listers Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, were a no-show.
Dior’s 1955 visit to Scotland was a rather less tweedy, if no less glamorous affair. The fashion show at Gleneagles was staged on a 60ft catwalk installed in the hotel’s ballroom specially for the occasion, and was entitled the Entente Cordiale to mark the 50th anniversary of the AngloFrench agreement.
The outfits on show included ballgowns, wedding dresses, enormous hats and Dior’s signature New Look suits with nipped in waists, a style which was so controversial when it launched in 1947 that it sparked protests in France and America at its decadence, so soon after the end of the war.
The whole event was staged to raise money for Friends of France – a charity set up in Glasgow after the Second World War which arranged visits between French and Scottish schoolchildren – chaired by Lord Inverclyde. Between the two shows they raised £4,000 for the charity, a significant sum for the time.
Dior, a confirmed lover of British culture who often ate porridge for breakfast and was an avid fan of plain fare such as Yorkshire puddings and mince pies, adored tartan as a fabric, and used it in a number of his fashion collections.
In fact tartan became such a hallmark for him that, according to 1950s model Margaret Vyner, he once had some ‘very chic’ tartan glasses made. While in Scotland he pronounced the kilts worn by men attending his shows ‘magnifique!’
‘Staged on a specially-built 60ft catwalk’
He was also particularly taken with the traditional Scottish dancing that followed the fashion show, which he wrote about in his autobiography.
‘After the show, there was an unexpected contrast which delighted my French eyes: The parade of girls in their delicate evening dresses was succeeded by Scottish reels danced by magnificent Scottish gentlemen in their kilts,’ he wrote in Dior by Dior, which was first published in 1956, a year after the Scottish shows, and one year before his tragically early death at the age of 52 from a heart attack.
‘It looked wonderful, but beneath the frenzied stampings of the dancers, the floor shook and bounced, and we were all nervous that it would collapse.
‘Noticing the worried expressions on our faces, the Lord Provost told us that the wooden floor was specially constructed to shake beneath our feet, in order to give the reels added animation.’
He was also taken with the Scottish aristocrats, many resplendent in their clan tartans.
In his autobiography, Dior said the ‘brilliant company’ included ‘all the Scottish nobility’ including the ‘delightful Duchess of Buccleuch’.
Scotland itself however, appeared to be the star of the show for the esteemed designer. ‘I lingered a little in Scotland,’ he wrote. ‘I had heard so much about its beauty that I had feared to be disappointed – on the contrary, I was even more struck by the beauty of the country, the castles, and the moors, than I had expected.’
One might hope that those travelling to Perthshire in June from Paris and beyond might be similarly taken with the landscape.
This corner of Perthshire has always attracted the well-heeled, thanks in part to Gleneagles, which has reigned as one of Scotland’s top hotels and golf courses for the best part of a century.
It was recently revamped under the ownership of Sharan Pasricha, a hotelier and entrepreneur whose firm Ennismore has updated some of the hotel’s interiors in a multimillion pound refurbishment programme, which added an exclusive secret bar and revamped its once traditional Strathearn restaurant. There has also been the addition of a private members club ‘in town’, with the Gleneagles Townhouse opening in Edinburgh in 2022.
Now a favourite of the Instagram and TikTok set, the original Gleneagles Hotel is also rumoured to be a possible location for the wedding reception for former Pussycat Doll Nicole Scherzinger and her fiancé, ex Scotland rugby star Thom Evans this summer. Might they pop to Drummond Gardens for the fashion extravaganza ahead of their own celebrations?
Gleneagles also boasts Restaurant Andrew Fairlie, which was until earlier this year the only two Michelin-starred restaurant in Scotland. Now there are two – the second, The Glenturret Lalique Restaurant, which earned its second Michelin star in February - is just a 20 minute drive away, on the outskirts of Crieff.
This glamorous culinary vortex certainly makes an alluring destination for those who can happily splash £195 per head for the Lalique tasting course menu (no wine included), or the similarly priced menu at Andrew Fairlie (where the menu slips in a whisker cheaper at £185 per head).
Back at Drummond Gardens, temporarily closed while the Dior’s set designers work their magic amongst the beautifully trimmed hedges and immaculate flower beds, organisers will be praying that the fashion gods smile on them on the day itself.
Hoping that the rain – unpredictable at any time of year in Scotland, even in June – holds off long enough for Dior’s latest collection to be shown in all its tartan and tweedy glory.
‘He pronounced the kilts worn by men at his shows magnifique’