I'm going to try to give my view on this collection fairly. Let's see how it goes.
Okay, to begin. I believe that Christian Dior has been excelling in the past few years with fashion. When we look at the Haute Couture line of Dior Couture Spring 2007 (Credit to style.com for these pictures)
We see what Dior is truly about. Dior has always become something of a strange beauty because John Galliano designs with some different, avant-garde ideas and muses in mind. He has taken ideas from Egypt, from royalty, and also from Japanese culture-- but there are a lot more elements blended in. For one, in the above picture, he uses some androgynous poses to make his shows more theatric. He uses strange styles to contruct dresses, and he does many of the clothes simply because he has an artful bias of what he loves to do-- create something gorgeous. All are things that have been deeply missing in the last few lines. If you view his Resort collection from last year, it was okay to go back to the 60's and the music was pretty fab-- but this ready-to-wear collection had music that was a direct rip-off of the resort line. He uses the song "Mrs. Robinson" which has a semblance to "Marrkesh Express" and it seems too close for comfort to what shows were like merely a season ago. Another element that is missing is the mirrored runway-- it made the dresses more presentable, like in Spring 2004 Couture (again, courtesy of style.com)
There are now many problems with this ready-to-wear collection that are currently bothering me. First, there's this:
(style.com)
The main problem with this dress is that it seems too much of a clash. It's great when John designs something out of the ordinary-- but he is a trend-setter in many ways and it feels strange to see him relying on a trend of using different colors and knick knack spots to blend into a large, clashing color. Sequins do not do very much for the dresses either, which is again shown here.
(style.com)
It's also not a common interest of John to make a dress that hugs close to the model's hips. He uses other means to show a dress off and uses volume while here-- it's not so pleasant and looks a little too much like a flowing dress from Versace at a glance. The impressions I get from this collection are many and not a lot are good. I would like to see a return of the mirrored runway-- to see better colors (not the pulsing, vibrant ruby jewel colors but instead to rely on the fun he used to have), I would wish to see less sequins because they now look tacky, and I would frankly like to see better make-up which was more fun and vibrant before. It's a big clash to go from this (Fall 2003 Couture)
(style.com)
To this:
(style.com)
I keep the faith, John can change things around even when we believe him to be down. There's a lot of pressure on designers to reform to designing clothes that are less artful. If that happens, haute couture dies and we live in a much blander world of fashion. I enjoy the dresses for their artful side and for the amount of work that goes into them. I'll keep hoping and I know I'll find a collection soon that I really enjoy.
The colours, the hair, make up, shoes, BAGS
. 100% 
