There’s something fitting about the fact that Raf Simons, a designer who has long focused on the interior lives of women, should find inspiration in another inner life for his fall 2015 Dior outing, namely interior decor, specifically upholstery fabrics. While that’s been a recurring thread, no pun intended, throughout this fall season, with designers playing with brocades and damasks and the like, Simons used the subtly flecked pink and navy tweeds of the Danish textiles company Kvadrat, with whom he collaborates on a special line of fabrics. This wasn’t so much let your dress match your romantic, pillow-strewn sofa, as let your sharp, masculine-inflected trouser suit the jacket loosely and somewhat androgynously tailored to the body, the pants cropped and cuffed match your corner office couch. For Kvadrat works with Knoll, Cassina, et cetera, who, among other things, produce furniture for business environments.
This leads us to another Simons trope: The (usually) Manhattan-located working woman, a figure confident and poised and cutting a swathe through a man’s world, a figure imbued with a certain heroism given she’s viewed from Simons’s always intelligent, always thoughtful European vantage point. That, then, was one narrative here: The exploration of what you can do with a jacket one very different from the classic Dior Bar jacket, it should be said and trousers. (The answer: You can accessorize them with the likes of abstract color-blocked shoulder purses with leather and chain straps, and glossy leather ankle boots on a high plexi block heel.) There were swaggering Wall Street double-breasted coats, long and loose and cut from burgundy or green wool, thrown into the mix, too.
Sometimes those coats cloaked the other story going on: Simons’s development of what he started with his brilliant haute couture show this past January. That might mean there would be more of the Veruschka-esque jacquard body suits underneath, now patterned with Simons’s idea of a futuristic, abstracted animal print. Other times that jacquard was used for a dress more like an exoskeleton, constructed out of harness-like knit strips and worn over men’s cotton shirts. And recurring throughout the show were a series of fantastic, short sixties-tinged dresses, with dipping hems, graphic curving bands, and caped backs, worn with fabulously sick, ultralong second-skin versions of those ankle boots. And given the way all this ticked off historicism and futurism, the industrial and the organic, the experimental and the classical, it was pure Raf Simons.
Discover the DIOR Fall/Winter '15/16 runway show at the end of this post! LoL, Andrea
Selections by ANDREA JANKE Finest Accessories
Photo Credit/Source: The House of Christian Dior
Photos: Kevin Tachman (stills) / Yannis Vlamos; Indigitalimages (runway)
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Deep down in this collection was Simons’s ongoing exploration of female sexuality, to which his choice of time frame was important, given it went through some radical and far-reaching changes from the fifties to the seventies. But maybe going further and further into this collection doesn’t really matter here, not when what was evident to the naked eye was quite so fantastic.Deep down in this collection was Simons’s ongoing exploration of female sexuality, to which his choice of time frame was important, given it went through some radical and far-reaching changes from the fifties to the seventies. But maybe going further and further into this collection doesn’t really matter here, not when what was evident to the naked eye was quite so fantastic.
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