Paris Couture: Cio-Cio-san Dior
Godfrey Deeny
January 22nd, 2007 @ 12:17 AM
Paris
Puccini would have dug this Christian Dior haute couture collection inspired by Madame Butterfly and packed with femme fatales worthy of a Kenji Mizoguchi tragedy.
Though the opera is set in Nagasaki and based on real events, Dior creative director John Galliano gave free rein to his imagination, mixing and melding Japanese, Chinese and Western imagery. From the remarkable bonsai-inspired headgear or Noh theatre makeup, it was as much Tokyo as Shanghai. One spectacular dress was even trimmed with images from Hokusai's famous Giant Wave.
A soundtrack that ranged from Giacomo Puccini to Malcolm MacLaren's dance funk version of Butterfly to doses of our favorite aria by the composer, Gianni Schicchi's O Mio Babbino Caro, caught the mood exactly.
Staged in a dreamlike setting of out of proportion Louis XVI chairs in Dior gray and Daliesque scones and chandeliers in off white, the collection, in a sense, marked a return to couture and away from Galliano's more excessive recent outings. Even the audience was radically reduced, from a high-wattage celebrity fest for 800 to a more polite gathering one third that number, composed of major fashion players and a few score of well-heeled clients.
Galliano hit the right note from the opening look, an embroidered pink, devil on heels, suit with layered pockets and collars in the core fabric of the show – silk gazar. The material was ideal for the stiff forms and precise cuts, the exaggerated wings and ballooning shoulders Galliano used throughout.
Lilac degradé silk dresses and ecrin evening suits came hand-painted with orchids or jazzed up with images of storks and flamingoes. Black crocodile suits protruded tails, cocktail dresses flew by made of peacock feathers.
Emphasizing their perilous positions, many models barely made it up a short central block of steps, even with the assistance of polite young usher. Then again, a tiring march was a key part Puccini's formation. He became inspired to be a composer after walking from his hometown of Lucca to Pisa to see a performance of Verdi's Aida. The distance – oh, a mere 18.5 miles, or 30 kilometers.
Jacquetta Wheeler, in a particularly beautiful tulle dress, actually got stuck for good 15 seconds, before two guests helped disentangled the supe.
Now it might seem perverse to talk about empowerment of women, when you see models so constrained by their outfits, yet freeing women is what Galliano does better than any other designer in the sense that he offers the most feminine take in fashion, and its most gilded and phantasmagorical vision of life and beauty.
Then again, the geisha's tragedy has long been an inspiration to artists in all media. Mizoguchi, still the nearest cinema has come to Shakespeare, was the son of a carpenter so poor he was forced to sell an older daughter as a geisha, affecting Mizoguchi for the rest of his life and inspiring his greatest films.
©2007 Fashion Wire Daily
this collection, love the colors, imagry, shapes, and styling...everything is so beautiful and breathtaking...though I admit that the inspiration is dated...the application and techniques make issue irrelevent...
I can't wait until style.com has them up on video.
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