It is a grim, gray period of recession - and the house of Christian Dior is sending out dresses bouncing jubilantly with meters of material. And no, this is not Dior's defiant New Look of 1947, but John Galliano's haute couture for summer 2009.
So much for austerity chic! The couture shows opened in Paris on Monday with "Let them eat cake" delirium in the face of global gloom. Yet the cakes were so delicious, so light, sweet and delicately made that you could do nothing but smile benignly.
Substitute a sugar rush of lacy collars, organza cornets and meringue-light crinolines served up on a blue and white delft plate patterned with tulips - and there you have the extreme fashion that Galliano sent out for Dior.
In straitened circumstances, was it mad? Yes, but it was magic.
"Something to make people dream," Bernard Arnault, chairman and chief executive of LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton and Christian Dior, said backstage, while predicting that the crisis would not begin to recede until the end of 2010.
The actress Mischa Barton drooled over the dresses, while the French star Marion Cotillard said more cautiously, "Not all of them - but the white."
She was referring to the slender outfits that punctuated the full skirts that were very Dior from the 1950s. Other crinoline fantasies could have come from the Second Empire, give or take those horns of plenty riding up to bare the thigh, as the models teetered on their curlicue-heel shoes.
Galliano is a dreamer and, impossible though it might sound to be eloquent with elegance in this bleak period for the world's economies, he sent out a beautiful show. A backdrop of stained glass, to meld with the hats, collars and big sleeves absorbed from Flemish painting, gave a freshness to what could have seemed at first glance mere costume-party clothes.
Citing as inspiration the posture in Van Dyck's noble portraits and the luminous colors of Vermeer, Galliano referred also to "reaching the soul of Christian Dior," by unpicking some historical outfits.
From the short yellow dress with its curving cornets that opened the show, though a scarlet woman satin cocktail dress, to black ribbons threaded though a full-skirted white dress, the models, with their frizz of curls, looked sweetly romantic.
Tough times tend to bring out feminine frivolity, especially in Paris. Yet the couture season is reduced to just three days and seems inexorably on its way out. But if the role of couture is to titivate a dry palette - and maybe to make women fall irredeemably in love with fashion, Galliano did that for 21st-century Dior.
suzy menkes,
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