Suzy Menkes at Paris Fashion Week ready-to-wear spring summer 2020

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26th Sep 2019

Dior: creative director Maria Grazia Chiuri pays homage to the founder’s war-hero sister, whose love of gardening provides a metaphor for the collection

Christian Dior’s remarkably courageous, indeed exceptionally brave, sister was the subject of the show that effectively opened Paris Fashion Week.

Held in a tent transformed into a garden with a forest of trees – to be sent later to woodland near Paris – the show was a tribute to Catherine Dior, who was arrested in Paris by the German Army in 1944 for supporting the Polish Resistance. Tracked down and marched away by the Gestapo, she was incarcerated in Ravensbrück. 

When she finally returned, Dior nurtured his starved and shattered sister, re-introducing her to the sweet flowers of the South of France, where she worked in Grasse, growing plants, while he cherished his nearby house and garden, La Colle Noire. 

Very little has been said about Catherine, who only died in 2008, especially by her brother’s famous fashion company. Perhaps the story seemed too painful to release, especially in the sensitive period of blame and shame immediately after the war.  Now Justine Picardie, outgoing editor-in-chief of Harper’s Bazaar UK, is working on a book about this brave woman. 

By using Dior’s sister as her inspiration, Maria Grazia Chiuri hit a nerve. I would have liked to see a backdrop of those sweet flowers of the Midi area that comforted Catherine, rather than the menacing forest in the show.

But Maria Grazia knows that with all the current Amazon fires and deforestation, even the ugliest tree has become precious. “This is a way to think of the future in a positive light and to give hope to future generations,” Maria Grazia explained.

And she hit the spot by including in her focus this unknown side of Dior. Apart from one letter about Catherine in the French edition of the recent Dior museum show, Christian Dior: Designer of Dreams, this powerful woman has remained in the shadows of history.

“The idea for the show was to pay homage to her as a woman gardener; the entire look had to create that kind of attitude,” said the designer, who works with her daughter, Rachele Regini, and an army of young women in the Dior studios.

Inspired by the ‘Planetary Garden’ at the Manifesta 12 art and culture biennale in Palermo in 2017, Maria Grazia was impressed that its creators “spoke about the coexistence between different trees that come from different parts of the world” and that the garden would be taken care of by Palermo’s current residents for the future. “The garden is an important heritage of Dior and that Planetary Garden helped us move this in to the future, to make something less decorative and more of an action,” the designer explained.

Maria Grazia has an exceptional skill at turning her often complex concepts into a buck. No wonder she is a heroic figure to the Arnault family, who have learned that she has the Midas sales touch. It is easy to imagine next season’s wide-and-thin checked blazers, perhaps lying low on the shoulders, with well-cut shorts or semi transparent chiffon skirts, flying out of Dior’s doors.

The workmanship was dense but subtle in effect; for example, dresses woven with dandelions (the French give those meadow flowers the more vulgar name of ‘pis-en-lit’ or ‘pee in the bed’). Those flowers rose to menacing sizes on the sweetest dresses, using different techniques of compressing, patterning and creating flower specimens. Similar shapes were also woven in silken raffia. 

The effect, as so often with Maria Grazia’s big shows, was of silhouettes staying much the same with the originality mostly in the materials. Or, to put it more crudely, the inventiveness seemed a bit thin, while the wearable and sellable items were big and fat. “To create something not only seasonal but also timeless, and also fashionable and novel… It’s really difficult to have a good balance between these elements,” Maria said.

And yet… Team Dior does a splendid job with the accessories, using everything from straw sandals to the gardening hats of Stephen Jones. So just as roots grow into flowers, Maria Grazia’s blooms can be expected to appeal to customers.

We, in the audience, have become so used to crazy Instagrammable images to stuff into our phones, that it takes time to calm down and remember that fashion used to be designed for a known audience: the clients. Most especially by Christian Dior himself, who named the famous Miss Dior fragrance after his sister. He would surely be pleased to see Catherine come out of the shadows and into the light. 

Dior ready-to-wear spring/summer 2020. Image credit: GoRunway.com

Saint Laurent: playing the light fantastic

Anthony Vaccarello offers classic YSL with a sensual curve and trips to Russia or Marrakesh. 

Lights opening up on a rain-drenched floor at the Saint Laurent show looked like giant creatures of the night ready to devour the bare legs above.

Up, up climbed this crystal white lumiere, raking over soft flesh and then teeny-tiny shorts – in hard denim, soft velvet or thick leather. Meanwhile, overhead, the Eiffel Tower beamed through this watery storm – until Naomi Campbell walked the final steps of the parade.

Welcome to the world of Anthony Vaccarello!

Except, of course, that it is not really the designer’s own universe, but that of Yves Saint Laurent, who had ceased to be inventive before the turn of the millennium, yet whose earlier inspirations are forever young. 

“I really want to play homage to the smoking (dinner jacket) and to say, ‘OK, that’s the house of the tuxedo, if you need one you have to come to Saint Laurent because otherwise you get a fake tuxedo.’ That was my basic idea,” Vaccarello explained on the edge of the soaked runway.

The designer belittles himself. For this was one of Vaccarello’s most far-reaching shows, including references to the rich YSL period of Russian icons and hippie de luxe from Marrakesh. It is just that Vaccarello mostly sucked out the colour and played with black and gold. 

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“I started with structure and everything very dark – a heavy summer, with heavy embroidery and colours -not very light – more dark green, heavy gold. I really want to give another aspect of summer,” the designer said.      

The intermittent rain was almost enough to wipe off the spirit of summer – even if the crowds of ‘ordinary’ folk seemed happy to stand and cheer Kate Moss, walking to her place in a tuxedo jacket over leather trousers, or Zoë Kravitz in what looked like bra-and-lace underwear.

The number of high-octane celebrities included Cindy Crawford, who came to watch daughter Kaia on the runway, to Andie MacDowell, and Rami Malek who played Freddie Mercury in the Queen biopic, Bohemian Rhapsody. 

The monumentalism of the lights, opening up like hungry mouths – the better to eat up its prey  – was a work of art and enabled the audience to absorb just how many pieces there were to try and buy: dozens of different jackets; voluptuous curvy little dresses; floating long dark dresses lashed with golden lace. It was a tour de force done cunningly to look casual. 

But what about those lights everywhere, licking at the models’ high-heeled shoes and knee-high boots?

“I wanted to do something for outside space so I thought of putting the light on the floor,” Vaccarello explained. “It can be like a new chandelier for the Russian collection, coming from the floor. It’s like when you are drunk seeing all the lights in double vision.”

And the Eiffel Tower, all lit up, once again as a backdrop to the show?

“I cannot find another place here that is so…Tour Eiffel for me is like Saint Laurent, it’s what you have in mind when you think of Paris.”

Saint Laurent ready-to-wear spring/summer 2020. Image credit: GoRunway.com

Dries Van Noten sings Christian Lacroix’s song

Two absolutely opposing designers harmonise their vision to make an exceptional Paris show.

Who would have thought it could be a love story made in fashion heaven?

On one side, in chilly northern Europe, the wind was blowing in a smart tailored coat, its only accent a wafting feather in the hair. On the other side, the Mediterranean with colours kissed by the southern sun, an orgy of golden yellow top and deep orange floral skirt. Or perhaps bright patterns printed on black silk, worn with a chiffon skirt, rolling out like waves of the sea.

The mash-up of artistic opposites was created by Belgian designer Dries Van Noten who has been secretly working with Christian Lacroix, born and raised in southern France. The unexpected collaboration, and especially the explosion of colour, pattern and decorative fabrics, at first caused a sharp intake of breath in the audience. 

Then came cries of enthusiasm and excitement as the two designers brought their separate spirits even closer together. To roars of applause, a tide of onlookers flowed backstage to make sure that this fashion marriage was for real.

Who could have expected that 10 years after he left fashion, closed his couture house to spend a decade creating theatrical and ballet costumes, that Lacroix would be on stage being cheered for his fashion artistry? And what a stage! In a deliberate move from recent Van Noten shows in the grand gilded and velvet Hôtel de Ville, he brought the designers together in the bleak backstage of the Opera Bastille.

The duo would not discuss their mix and match show that will surely go down in fashion history. But there was an immediate appreciation of the way that pieces, such as the richly coloured Lacroix velvet or his dashing swags of feather, faced-off beautiful fashion discretion in the Belgian way. 

A nest of white top and trousers was finished off with a single curved feather. And there were many other apparent simplicities: a tailored jacket and long skirt that would have been smart in black but looked sensational in a scarlet top with a buttercup yellow skirt. There was a similar effect of fake simplicity when a navy blazer was worn over a patterned red top and trousers. The platform shoes alone were works of art, from satin Japanese flip flops to brocade ankle boots.

In the stream of consciousness, offered digitally from both designers, Lacroix mused: “I think it was Baudelaire who said that the real artist, the real designer, the real painter was the one who knows when to stop.”

“I never knew when to stop,” he continued. “Now the essence of contemporary fashion comes from this very subtle way of using beauty – strangeness, ugliness – just a little twist, but not shocking. Shocking was very fashionable in the Eighties!”

The two designer artists admitted their differences, with Lacroix saying: “My motto when I was a teenager was that too much is never enough.” While Dries took the opposite view: “For me ‘too much’ is not something I arrive at quickly,” he said. “I put more and more layers which afterwards you can dissect, peel away like an onion.”

There did not seem to be much discarding in this joyous display of artisanship on the runway. But there was food for fashion-thought. Why has clothing become so homogenised? Or as Dries put it: “Everything today is so branded, so focussed, so edited that it was nice for me to see whether one designer could work with another on a collection.” 

“It’s so different to how people look at a house now, to a brand, to an ego. For me, instead of doing a homage (to Lacroix) I had the opportunity to act.”

For a rare and blessed moment, two fashion voices sang in perfect harmony.

Dries Van Noten ready-to-wear spring/summer 2020. Image credit: GoRunway.com