Dior's latest collection is bursting with a rich variety of allusions to art and fashion history
Just five days after the blockbusting triumph of dressing Oscar winner Jennifer Lawrence for the red carpet, the house of Christian Dior on Friday scored an arthouse hit at Paris fashion week.
Lawrence's showstopping Hollywood gown – widely acclaimed by fashion critics, despite being so enormous as to cause her to fall over in front of an audience of millions – scored maximum points for the Dior brand for a mass audience. In Paris, designer Raf Simons aimed to impress in a very different key, with a second ready-to-wear collection bursting at its perfectly finished seams with meaningful references to art and fashion history.
The central reference was Andy Warhol. Simons filled the catwalk with silver balloons, giant versions of those Warhol used to decorate the Factory. Warhol's early drawings of faces, butterflies and shoes were printed on handbags and embroidered on to silk evening gowns.
Warhol is an ingeniously clever allusion for Simons to alight upon. Of all the Parisian houses, Dior is associated with the most traditional, conservative aesthetic. The perennial appeal of the New Look is a double-edged sword for Simons, giving the label eternal prestige but tethering it to the 1950s, a decade that is a byword for respectability. Who better than Warhol to make the point that the 1950s could also be forward-looking and subversive? The illustrations used in the collection were all drawn in Warhol's early years, which cross over with Christian Dior's Paris heyday. This message was pointedly reinforced by the shownotes, which specified the dates of each: "shoe 1955", "female head 1956-1958".
In a gallery-like marquee next to the Hotel d'Invalides, the Warhol balloons were suspended over a catwalk painted with fluffy white clouds on a blue background. It was a reference to the surrealism of Magritte, who used blue skies in incongruous settings (interior walls, night-time scenes) but also a link to Simons' previous collection: in the advertising campaign now running for Dior's current collection, models perch on window ledges through which the same Magritte sky can be glimpsed. This collection, then, matches the one seen through the window of the last one: the narrative of Dior's post-Galliano story is being plotted as carefully as a thriller.
The message was received, loud and clear. But some of the most desirable pieces in this collection were those which stood independent of the arthouse theme. A collarless grey astrakhan coat, tailored above the hip before fluting into a swinging skirt, was simple and perfect. The bar jacket trouser suits, with the modernised peplum of the bar jacket atop perfect Oxford bags, were utterly modern and desirable. The dominance of crisp, collarless cuts and graphic lines showed the remarkable degree to which Simons has quietly stamped his personality on Dior.
This was a cerebral collection, but if Simons can paint a Dior picture both in these nuanced tones and the flashier palette demanded by the red carpet, he will flourish. Figures released this month suggest he has already had a positive impact on Dior's bottom line: sales rose by 24% in 2012, following Simons' appointment early that year.
Roland Mouret, son of a Lourdes butcher, has established his home in the Suffolk countryside and his business headquarters in Mayfair. A more Anglophile lifestyle it is hard to imagine, but for the past six years he has staged his catwalk shows in Paris. And you can tell.
This the designer himself acknowledged, while checking the final looks on models backstage before his show on the Rue Castiglione. "Every season I show here, the aesthetic becomes more and more Parisienne. The trends which happen in London or New York matter less here than the codes of Paris style, which are unavoidable – irresistible, in fact." Asked to divulge a few of these codes, he listed red with black, leopard print, strong shoulders, and sheer tights the French call fumé. ("As if cigarette smoke is wrapping around your legs," Mouret explained to confused Brits.)
The ultimate reference, he said, is Catherine Deneuve. ("She's blonde, but she's a bit nasty.") The models wore their hair in sprayed and polished chignons, their eyes obscured with shades or by dark shadow. There was a musky hint of the strong, classic chic of 1980s Yves Saint Laurent in both the clothes and the styling.
The beating heart of this label will always be an evolution from the Galaxy dress which first shot Mouret to fame. Fitted dresses with full-length back zips, prim but sexy, revealing little flesh but amplifying every curve were as instinctively desirable in this collection as they have ever been, panelled in tints of leopard print, or combinations of black, ivory, crimson and tobacco. (Mouret aficionados will be interested to learn that the width of the zipper has been increased this season, for strength, from 4mm to 6mm.)
As is often the case for Mouret, the dresses seemed to suck in all the oxygen, leaving trousers, blouses and jackets looking weak by comparison. But Mouret may have hit upon an important new strength with handbags, launched for the first time this season. Discreet, structured, with subtly gleaming hardware and an air of quiet confidence, the bags compliment the signature dresses, and are strong enough to steal their limelight. They carry echoes of Hermès, most classically Parisian of all handbag labels, and have names to match: the day bag is named Hugo, after Mouret's favourite writer, while the evening bags are Le Sept and Paris Paris, after the nightclubs of his youth.