Marc Bohan, former top designer for Dior
Marc Bohan, the longestserving creative director at Christian Dior, who spent nearly 30 years spinning out classically attuned looks with a touch of whimsy that, however resplendent, were meant to be worn, not gazed at on mannequins or in fashion magazines, died Wednesday in Châtillon-surSeine, France. He was 97.
His death was confirmed in a statement by Dior.
Because he worked in an era before fashion became mass entertainment, Mr. Bohan was not required to be visionary. And surviving for decades at the upper reaches of the fickle fashion world, with its unceasing scrutiny, merciless critics, and headspinning fashion cycles, he showed little interest in coming up with grandiose couture creations that functioned more as sculpture than practical apparel, no matter how sumptuous or bejeweled his own work was.
“I’m not designing to please myself or for a photograph,” he told USA Today for a 1988 profile. “I am designing for a woman who wants to look her best. I have always in mind the reaction of women I know.”
Courtly, taciturn, and immaculately dapper even by the standards of midcentury Paris, Mr. Bohan was 34 when he was appointed head couturier for the House of Dior in 1960, taking over for the maverick Yves Saint Laurent. Saint Laurent, then in his early 20s, had been called up by the French army during the Algerian war for independence.
“Before my first collection for Dior, most people had the knives out,” Mr. Bohan told Women’s Wear Daily in 2007. “People were licking their lips. They were waiting for me to fall on my face.”
If so, the skeptics were thwarted. Carrie Donovan, fashion editor of The New York Times Magazine, declared that 1920s-inflected debut collection, presented at the Paris shows in January 1961, “a smash hit.”
Elizabeth Taylor ordered a dozen dresses from the collection, Mr. Bohan told USA Today; Marlene Dietrich snapped up a jacket and skirt.
Under his direction, Dior helped redefine silhouettes for women’s apparel, with an emphasis on bias-cut skirts and drop-waist dresses.
While his sensibility was refined, Mr. Bohan also channeled the explosion of free-spirited color and creativity of 1960s and ’70s pop culture into high fashion. He earned raves in 1966 for a fall couture collection inspired by the 1965 film “Doctor Zhivago,” set in wintry Russia, with its furtrimmed coats and high boots.
His January 1970 collection raised eyebrows among some fashion arbiters for its extravagant use of cobra-skin banding on coats, suits, and dresses, along with other dashes of animal hides.
“What made some critics cross,” Gloria Emerson wrote in the Times, “aside from all those miles of snake, were the horsehair and amber necklaces, and horsehair belts. They look like shaving brushes.”
The Times was kinder to Mr. Bohan’s 1974 collection, which critic Bernadine Morris proclaimed a “bombshell.”
Morris went to so far as to compare Mr. Bohan’s skirts — widened and lengthened to midcalf with more generously cut tops — to Dior’s revolutionary New Look of 1947, which, with its emphasis on wasp waists and long skirts, revived Paris fashion after World War II and influenced women’s fashion for a decade.
Roger Maurice Louis Bohan was born in Paris on Aug. 22, 1926. Artistically inclined as a child, he was introduced to fashion by his mother, a milliner.
After graduating from a public secondary school in the Paris suburbs, he briefly studied finance before turning his sights to fashion. He honed his craft at Piguet, Edward Molyneux, and Jean Patou.
Despite his illustrious career, Mr. Bohan remained little known outside fashion circles. “Over the years, I’ve always thought of couture as being a sort of laboratory for fashion,” he said in a 1982 interview with The Montreal Gazette. “And it will continue to exist so long as there are clients for it.”