Dior beguiles with irresistibly re-imagined 1950s fashion
In poll after poll, the 1950s emerge as a favourite fashion decade, possibly because they were bookended by two strong but oppositional silhouettes – the full skirts and wasp-waisted jackets ushered in by Christian Dior’s 1947 New Look and the narrow skirts that began to feature in Yves Saint Laurent’s beatnik-inspired collections for Dior between 1958 and 1960.
In other words, there’s something for everyone (along with Teddy Boys and Girls), plus a world that was changing rapidly for women. France may only have given its women the vote in 1944 but after that, all bets were off. In 1949, Simone de Beauvoir published The Second Sex, credited with lighting the touch paper for second wave feminism – and duly banned by the Vatican.
A few years later, et voilà, Juliette Greco, the singer/actress who did so much to popularise the idea of a bohemian, liberated existence.
When a female designer as alive to what other women want to wear as Dior’s Maria Grazia Chiuri immerses herself in all this you can be sure something interesting will surface. Sure, she has Dior’s fastidiously curated archives to play with – and a growing obsession with Catherine Dior, a resistance fighter in the Second World War and later an inspiration for almost all her brother Christian did. But no major designer today can simply pedal an unreconstructed version of the 1950s to a 21st-century woman conditioned to expect far more comfort and function from her outfits than her grandmother. The Marvelous Mrs Maisel, the Amazon Prime hit about a housewife turned comedian who starts off in skirts so stiff they must have drained America’s reserves of sugar water, this is not.
Instead we have an utterly beguiling collection of re-imagined 1950s mohair duster coats, single-breasted Bar jackets with only the lightest of padding and structure, embellished pencil skirts and fuller, swishier ones. Archive rose prints (a nod to Catherine Dior who, on being liberated from a concentration camp at the end of the war, became the first woman granted a licence to sell flowers in Les Halles) were reproduced using modern techniques that lent them a blurry, ikat effect.
There was so much here to covet, from the slimline top-handled bags (with straps long enough to loop over a shoulder) to puff-sleeved sheath dresses a la Edith Piaf. Dior’s prices are something else, but as a new “je ne regrette rien” slogan T-shirt debuted in the show suggests, the maison’s clients will find this collection hard to resist.