Christian Dior Ready to Wear Skirt

The collection that designer John Galliano presented for Christian Dior on Tuesday night at the Grand Palais received a massive crowd of curious onlookers lining the entrance to celebrity watch. Most of the audience at the Dior show know John Galliano by name, if not by reputation. His collections are an emotional experience, and like them or not, their style expresses what he wants to say as a designer. Each syllable must be carefully and dramatically enunciated in order to convey the full jaw-dropping ungainliness of this Spring 2007 collection.

The Christian Dior’s show began with a single model marching down the long runway in a pale green suit. It was a color commonly referred to as institutional green. The jacket was cut with wide, rounded shoulders and a relatively boxy torso. It denied the existence of a woman’s waist. There were patches of lace on the suit jacket in the same shade of dismal green. The skirt fell to the knee. And in a spring season exemplified by short skirts and long ones, knee-length skirts can only be seen as noncommittal. The model’s hair was tucked into a constrained pageboy. It looked as though she had a large mushroom cap atop her head. A silver chain snaked down the part in her hairdo. It was an extraordinary feat for a hairstylist to make a young, attractive woman look so plain and matronly.

It seems sad and strange that ten years of audacious design at Dior has come down to a gray suit whose homely fit betrays a purposeful lack of attention to detail. No one knows better than Mr. Galliano that the design of these clothes was not up to the standards of a Paris fashion house. But also, no one knows better than Mr. Galliano what it’s like to work in a modern fashion bureaucracy, with stores that must be fed. Odds are he knew exactly what he was doing with this collection, and he’s waiting to see what the pudding will tell. That’s why you feel the dreary suits and clumsily draped dresses he sent out were a kind of a muzzle. Or perhaps a classic retort to an unwelcomed event. Mr. Galliano may be free to design what he wants for haute couture “the expensive, fun stuff that generates buzz and marketing images” but his boss at LVMH Mot Hennessy Louis Vuitton, the chairman Bernard Arnault, has told him he wants ready-to-wear that sells.
“The direction has been given, yes,” said Sidney Toledano, the chief executive of Dior. “We need suits.” He added: “Buzz is not our priority right now. It’s showing the products.”

Dior’s rival in quality and status is Chanel, and Chanel sells a lot of suits. But that scarcely accounts for the remarkable restraint of Mr. Galliano’s beige and gray suits, with embroidery dully scattered at the hem, and taupe dresses dangling with banal gold chain.
More likely, the one-plus-one answer is India and China. Conservative and increasingly prosperous, those countries are likely to need suits. And as retailers everywhere like to say, referring to their trade in tailored clothes, “The money is on the shoulders.”

The first model was not immediately followed by another, and so for a moment one thought that perhaps she represented some sort of fashion joke: Send out a sad little mannequin gussied up in a suit that looks as though it has been plucked from the back archives of Kasper, Albert Nipon or Nolan Miller and give the audience a dose of irony. Then the real show will begin with a drumroll and a flash of light.
That uninspired, banal suit was at the heart of the collection. Was Galliano angry with his employers? Was this the designer equivalent of a temper tantrum? The clothes came in shades that could kindly be described as ecru and taupe but more realistically should be dubbed: cadaver, mummy or mold.

There were draped dresses that were mildly attractive but not particularly well executed. Nothing in this line seemed to fit properly. Everything was too big. The fabric twisted across the breasts and hung loosely down the back. This is Christian Dior, for heaven’s sake! The prices of these clothes could keep a family of four knee-deep in foie gras and truffles for six months. Dior dresses should look luxurious and expensive and enviable from 50 yards away, well from a mile away. They don’t have to be pretty (that can be boring, too), but they should dazzle the eye, not merely startle it. It may be that seasons from now, the runways will be crowded with loose-fitting suits in somber colors. And if that is the case, then Galliano should certainly be credited with causing a tremendous shift in the dominant silhouette. If that happens, however, one hopes that other designers are not so unkind to women as to make them look as though they should be checked for a pulse.

At Christian Dior’s rival, Chanel, designer Karl Lagerfeld has clarified and protected the iconic Chanel jacket. Alber Elbaz completely reinvented Lanvin with his languid, easy glamour and transformed it into a label that is wholly his own. Nicolas Ghesquiere has turned Balenciaga into a forward-looking brand that honors its history. Yves Saint Laurent resides in the capable hands of Stefano Pilati, who inspired the world’s designers to embrace bubble skirts, trapeze dresses and poufy topiary frocks with a single influential collection. Elbaz, Ghesquiere and Pilati have become Paris’s three reliable fashion prognosticators.

Christian Dior and the other great brands on the Paris runway have been in transition over the past decade. Most have found successors and redefined themselves or, like Rochas, they have been quietly laid to rest. Rochas was revived by Olivier Theyskens. Under his care, the label was celebrated and lionized. But its owner, Procter & Gamble, uninterested in committing to the long and expensive prospect of building a ready-to-wear business, retired the clothing line earlier this year. Theyskens moved on to Nina Ricci — another house, another revival.

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Tags: Christian Dior, Dior

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 7th, 2006 at 12:07 am and is filed under Beauty, Fashion, Lifestyle. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.