‘Raf Simons takes the strapless dress – a style that recently seemed relevant only to weddings and proms – and turns it into something you’d totally want to wear out for dinner’
There is a scene in the excellent fashion documentary Dior & I when designer Raf Simons is shown the first draft of a dress he has tasked the atelier with producing. It has a classically shaped, strapless, boned corset. He frowns and points to the line above the bust. It is too low, too scooped, he says. It should be higher, straighter. You can sense the unspoken queries from his team. (Shouldn’t a bustier be feminine, revealing? Isn’t that the point?) But then you see the remade dress, with its higher, straighter neckline, and you know Simons is right. His new-look bustier isn’t classic, or romantic. By raising the top of the fabric, and discarding the traditional sweetheart curlicues in favour of a poker-straight line, he takes the strapless dress – a style that recently seemed relevant only to weddings and proms – and turns it into something you’d totally want to wear out for dinner, weather and Pilates-attendance permitting.
It’s a tiny adjustment, but it makes all the difference. (The style has since spread. The one I’m wearing, happily for the price tag, is not by Dior, but by Raey, the brilliant own-label bit of Matches.) I would never have worn a corset-style bustier on this page, but I’m happy to wear the straight kind, because the new version feels more chic and less vulnerable. There’s a shift in attitude disproportionate to the small amount of extra coverage. The fact that this bustier shape pretends your breasts somehow don’t exist makes the half-undressedness of the look less of an issue.
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