Dior’s Fresh Start
Outside the enormous box-shaped structure in the Tuileries, the line of spectators stretched to the Place de la Concorde, where royals were guillotined during the French Revolution. It was many bodies deep, and more onlookers stood on a nearby rise to watch guests arriving for Dior and the debut of Jonathan Anderson’s women’s collection. It was by far the largest crowd in recent memory.
Inside, Johnny Depp, wearing a gray suit coat, jeans, paint-stained clodhoppers, and a fedora, was chatting with Brigitte Macron, in a light-blue blazer and jeggings with stilettos, and Bernard Arnault, the chief of LVMH. Paris fashion shows tend to give you a false sense of familiarity — there’s Jennifer Lawrence, Anya Taylor-Joy — but because Dior had dramatically reduced the number of guests for the show, placing us all on low wooden blocks like kids at camp, the atmosphere felt intimate, privileged.
That feeling was about to be disturbed. A large inverted pyramid dominated the center of the room, extending from the ceiling to a few feet above the polished gray floor. They were screens, a stylish jumbotron; and once the lights dimmed, on them appeared the title of a video in a horror-movie font: Do You Dare Enter the House of Dior.
Anderson had asked the British television journalist Adam Curtis to make a compact history of the house, and Luca Guadagnino, who is a friend of Anderson’s, had designed the set so that the audience would be looking up at the screens. Indeed, Curtis’s imagery, his depiction of the brand’s former designers and the overly theatrical fashion world, would be bearing down on us. It would feel like pressure. And it did, with a horror-movie flavor mingled with a pressure that is unique to the Paris high-fashion scene. In his propulsive editing style, Curtis had included movie clips of knives and blood, as well as documentary footage of editors at a John Galliano show being nearly crushed.
Well, people die for fashion.
The video provided the context that Anderson needed for his collection. Who, nowadays, remembers Yves Saint Laurent’s short and disastrous run as creative director, much less Christian Dior’s designs, apart from the New Look? The day before his show, Anderson said of the video, “It’s a way of saying, ‘Look, there is more than John, there is more than Raf’” — Raf Simons, creative director from 2012 to 2015 — “‘and there’s more to this brand than we think.’” Maria Grazia Chiuri’s collections were repetitive in their simplicity. And over the past decade, in fashion things have moved extremely fast, with an explosion of images. Anderson added, “We live in a period, as Adam was saying, where we don’t want to take time anymore. We want to just consume.”
In a way, Anderson has forced a pause with this collection, which felt more complete and progressive than his first offering, for men, in June. He is asking a house and its customers, used to princess gowns and tweaked renditions of the famous Bar jacket, to accept, instead, a short dress with a teacup skirt in cream, pale-pink, or dusty-blue bias-pleated silk. Or a shrunken version of the Bar with a miniskirt that extends out at the back. Or a flowing top in pleated, deep-red silk satin with a high collar of black lace that unfurls in streamers down the back and was shown with extremely wide-leg white trousers.
He has changed proportions, played with Dior’s signifiers in a clever way, and generally lightened up the attitude. There’s a growing divide in fashion at the moment, between expression that reflects contemporary thinking in a creative way and that which remains rooted in older attitudes about status and glamour. Haider Ackermann’s Tom Ford, shown on Wednesday night, is a good example of the latter.
What Anderson gets right is that Dior can lead by provoking change, and by acknowledging that people want lighter clothes that are mobile in style, and knowing but not pretentious. He broke up many of the looks — meaning that he often paired, say, a black dinner jacket in a blend of silk and mohair with a casual miniskirt. A long, tiered bubble skirt in white Swiss dot came with a beige wool tunic with a deep V-neck traced in a wide black band. It was terrific as a less fussy evening look, or if a woman didn’t see herself in a bubble skirt, she could wear the top with pants. That flowing top with the black-lace collar? He showed the top in three different colors, and you could wear it with tailored black pants.
He provided multiple ways, for different ages and personalities, to enter the collection. And yet it still bore the imprint of Dior, particularly in the use of (light) floral embroideries and trims, like a pair of white hydrangea blooms in silk tucked into the gathers of an evening dress and finished with thin black streamers. His knitwear was imaginative, and included easy, form-fitting shapes as well printed mini-pouf skirts with a fuzzy, dry texture. He put movement in a lot of the short dresses and full skirts, using very light boning or gathers at the back. Again, the attitude was more ironic and playful than serious. And it made for a great line in profile. The black hats, by the milliner Stephen Jones and inspired by nun’s caps, also did their work. As the video showed, millinery is a long and sometimes sugary story at Dior.
And I liked the fact that Anderson offered so much sportswear, like the crisp, dark checked cotton shirts with stock ties and matching minis that opened the show, keeping the style on the French side of chic. My only beef with the collection is that Anderson’s shrunken Bar jacket and flared mini tripped into Marc Jacobs’s distorted doll territory, as did a white gown with exaggerated mounds at the hips, like funny paniers. Still, the rethinking of what Dior means opens the door further for Anderson and his collaborators. Watching the show, I was actually thinking he could push things further. In due time.
By the way, the designer invited Galliano for a visit to the studio on Monday, a fact he shared with several reporters. Anderson says that Galliano told him, “You need a mirror backstage. Because when a model is about to go on, she should look at herself and know what she’s wearing.” Anderson added, “I thought that was good advice. I’m learning.” He has already started work on the January couture show.
Ackermann gave an extremely high-styled presentation for Ford, on a flat, glossy black runway, the models striding slowly out in twos and threes, and looking almost untouchable, alien goddesses in blunt helmet cuts or slicked back hair. The male models often seemed like their drones, or at times, in tiny shorts with visible black jock straps and comfy ballet slippers, like a coterie of their own. In Ackermann’s vision, the men seem to have more freedom than the women. Some were wearing shorts and elegant dinner jackets, or a relaxed suit in a neutral tone, while the women got sleek, fitted coats, satin pantsuits in saccharine apple green and turquoise, and, in one or two cases, evening dresses made of little more than tight suspension cords and patches of fabric (a look Ackermann has done in the past for his own label). And the guys got the ballerinas while the girls got stilettos.
It’s a fairly predictable view of sex and gender. It also feels old. After last season’s strong debut, I thought Ackermann might open up the conversation further, loosen the trusses. Instead, he seemed to close down the view. And the Ford sensibility is more layered than this.
Olivier Rousteing has adjusted the fit and silhouette of Balmain as he’s needed over the past decade or so, and this season he went a lot softer and looser with the shapes. He said he imagined “the endless horizon of a beach.” Unfortunately, that was the effect of his many draped parachute pants, bomber jackets, and cotton sweaters in khaki, sand, and rust tones, some garments embroidered with clacking shells — in case you missed the point.
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