There
are as many responses to the last November attacks as there are designers in
Paris. It’s all but inevitable the subject would come up this week;
designers were working on their haute couture collections when the
events occurred. Giambattista Valli’s
idea for his Couture N° 10 was to look at the city’s famous gardens. “It’s kind of a
thank-you to Paris,” he said backstage. “You know that flowers are my
obsession. This time they come from the Parc de Bagatelle, the Jardin du
Luxembourg, the Palais-Royal, and the Jardin des Tuileries.”
The other ground-shifting event in Paris near that time, on a much smaller, less world consequential scale, of course, was Raf Simons’s abrupt departure from Dior.
In fact, with the intense focus on flowers here, some saw a bid by
Valli for the open creative director job at the LVMH house, flowers
having been a preoccupation of Monsieur Dior’s, as well. Be that as it
may, this was a signature Valli collection. Cue the short lengths,
tailor-made for the leggy young ladies who decorated his front row. Cue
the exaggerated volumes, this time focused on bishop sleeves, Watteau
backs, and a handful of empire-waist gowns. (An exhibition of paintings
featuring Napoleon’s sisters, Elisa, Pauline, and Caroline, proved
inspirational.) And cue the by now trademark parade of tulle plissé
grand finale gowns, the boldest and best in a pulsating shade of red
poppy.
Sparkle and sequin were downplayed here in favor of
colorful embroideries and appliqués; when Valli did employ crystals, it
was in grid-like patterns as precise as his flowers were flamboyant. As a
rule, the fleurs were more persuasive. They came in many forms: picked
out in paillettes on an organza empire-waist dress; as swirling garlands
on short-in-front/long-in-back gowns of lace macramé; and, quite
prettily, intarsia-ed in a rosebush motif on a short coat in white mink. Enjoy the Giambattista Valli Spring/Summer 2016 HC runway show at the end of this post.
A ray of sunlight pierces the Parisian
skies on a cloudy January 26th, and illuminates the dome of the
Grand Palais. Like a reminder of spring in the middle of winter, it
signals the start of Karl Lagerfeld’s Haute Couture Spring/Summer 2016 collection show. In an exaltingly bucolic set, a wooden house with
closed shutters blends in with the vegetation. The door opens to reveal
the first silhouettes. One by one, seeming to slow their pace to better
take advantage of the moment, the models wander through this Eden.
“After a woman, flowers are the most divine creations”, wrote
Christian Dior. And so it was only natural that the couturier would
employ flowers in all their forms as a way to highlight and heighten
femininity. For the Spring/Summer 1949 collection, he designed a
shirtdress whose name epitomized freshness: Ice-Cream. Its unique print in black and blue revisited the traditional cashmere motif by mixing it with stylized flowers.
The
highly graphic motif inspired several looks in the Dior ready-to-wear Autumn/Winter 2016/2017 show, which took place in the Cour Carrée of the
Louvre Friday, 5th March, 2016. It could be found enlarged and transposed into pink
and bordeaux on a silk jacquard coatdress. It also appeared on an
orange and gray sweater, contrasting with the twinkling embroidered
flowers on the skirt worn below. It also cropped up mixed with drawings
of birds on a knit or the draped velvet of a dress, the start of a whole
other story.
Kendall Jenner in Look N° 29
With its defined waist, sensual lines and a graphic neckline framed in
fur, the coat-dress worn by model Kendall Jenner in the Dior
ready-to-wear Autumn/Winter 2016/2017 show was a modern revisiting of
the Bar jacket, that House icon designed by Christian Dior in 1947.
There was a mirrored set reflecting infinity at the Christian Dior show, and a voice intoning “Time, time, time” on the soundtrack. What
did it signify the past on the left, the endless permanence of the
brand’s future on the right? Or, more pertinently, that the collection
passing through is but another soon-to-be-forgotten fleeting moment in
Dior’s history? As everyone knows, the task of keeping Dior warm between
the exit of Raf Simons and the hiring of a new creative director has been undertaken by the brand’s studio team.
Within
those parameters, studio heads Lucie Meier and Serge Ruffieux did quite
a decent placeholder job, which skewed rather refreshingly younger and
less uptight than before. There was a lot of black suiting, with slit,
high-waisted pencil skirts and softer jackets worn as a young girl
might, with pointy silver and black low Mary Janes. With their hair
tightly coiled into buns and ears studded with safety pins and other
jingle-jangles, the models walked easily and briskly, many in coats with
deep flounces in the hem. There were also cocktail dresses with swathed
necklines, scattered with random, vintage-y settings of colored gems.
Truth
be told, after that, a meandering feeling took over the coats kept
coming back, the suits and dresses kept reappearing, and there was never
much sense of a finale. Still, it wouldn’t be fair to dismiss this
joint effort without mentioning one surprise the Dior knits. Somebody on
the DIOR team had come up with some interesting, fashion-forward shapes one
with a strong black flounce running into a V and a high neckline,
another in shocking orange with leg-of-mutton sleeves, and a couple of
others with paisley patterns. Next season will probably be another
story, once a new creative director is found, but those who’ve been
holding the fort since Raf Simons quit have not disgraced the house.
The coats, in which the House ateliers possess an historic expertise, revisit the line of the iconic Bar suit. The petites mains
had to rethink its architecture, such as the cut of the peplums, in
order to make them asymmetric or exaggerated, but also the defined
waist, emphasised by large buttoned martingales. The work on the collar
alone corresponds to an entire chapter of the collection’s story: rolled
like a silk scarf, pleated, plunging, folded back over the shoulders…
It has been reinvented so that each garment can express a different
identity of the Dior woman.
All the skills of the petites mains
came to the fore in the motifs that embellished a chunk of the
collection quilting, hand-painted devoré velours, recolored
jacquards, trembling beaded floral bells, rectangular sequins dancing
under the lights as the model moved. Materials, techniques and
savoir-faire combine and accumulate to create an harmonious silhouette
with all the most exquisitely essential details.
For the ready-to-wear Autumn/Winter 2016/2017 collection the Dior woman
is piling on, mixing and layering her jewelry to compose articulated
mobiles in sync with her style. There are gilt metal multi-clip
earrings, bordeaux and gray rhinestone hoops, buttons in silver and
gold. There are also rings that wrap around the finger like a delicate
ribbon dabbed with little barrettes and colored plexiglas, glass and
rhinestones. The whole comes alive as the wearer moves. This
spontaneous and creative mixing of forms, colors and materials is also
to be found in the choice of bags.
A new House icon was to be discovered
fully embroidered or cut in exotic leathers such as yellow lizard,
teamed with a long-strap glasses case in smooth bordeaux leather or
violet lizard. Another bag resembles a giant wallet with compartments.
To finish off the look, the cut-out ankle boots also exhibited a subtle
play of color and material, whether that be black heels with black
crocodile and black laced lizard front, or brown heels with a band of
black lizard and dark blue lizard lacing. For that all-important final touch, the new DiorUmbrage glasses with lenses lightly tinted an orange, green or blue leaf print peppered the looks in the show.
Enjoy the DIOR Fall/Winter 2016/17 RTW runway show 'Best OF' by DIOR at the end of this post! LoL, Andrea
This spring, Peter Philips, Creative and Image Director for Dior Makeup,
reinterprets the art of a gorgeous glow with a luminous makeup
collection that teams new Backstage Pros essentials with eyeshadows and
lipsticks in colours inspired by the flower gardens of Granville.
