Fashion is sometimes spoken like a nightmare: a full of clothes inducing the pain that binds and deform the body, the standards of beauty which distort the soul and a system of values which associates with the grotesque.
He has rarely been a designer – one of the privileged sons of the industry – raising the subject.
However, there was Jonathan Anderson, freshly installed creative director of Dior, revealing his first collection of women’s clothing for the brand and starting it all with a horror film.
Taking advantage of a pyramid upside down hanging on its track, the film essentially positioned Dior as a house haunted by the ghosts of past designers (Christian Dior himself, Yves Saint Laurent, Marc Bohan, Gianfranco Ferré, John Galliano, Hedi Slimane, Kris Van Assche, Raf Simons, Kim Jones and Maria Grazia Chiuri). Images of fashion shows and various celebrity ambassadors have been spranged with lightning of blood, lightning blows and cries. It was as if Hitchcock met “the devil Porte Prada” on Hyperspeed.
Created by Adam Curtis, the filmmaker / social historian of the British documentary, the film was both a shot tour of the way Dior arrived here and a suggestion that the fashion industry was now nothing more like a bloody sport. Knives!
But it was also the claim of a birth right; A reminder that, although Dior has recently become a kind of couturier cosplay for the elegance of the upper crust (the look of the favorite first lady of Melania Trump is a Dior costume), the initial collections of Mr. Dior in post-war France have left part of its audience with the mouth open in an alarm to extravagance. And he laid the foundations of Mr. Anderson’s collection, which positioned Dior as a Petri box rather than a heavy institution.
The result was not so much a proposal to dress as an exercise in Dior designing: cut, recombinated, abstract and otherwise distant diorisms from history.
The classic Dior bar jackets had been narrowed to the size of the dolls, to better literally reduce the shadow they project, then associated with just as tiny skirts, so together the combination was exactly the same size as a classic bar jacket in itself. (It was a good idea.) Other bars saw their peplum transformed into two large loops in the form of a knot on the hips, then associated with mini-biskirts in denim. (It was a more portable idea).
There were sleeve-free satin dresses with large baskets for wrecking skirts that rushed on each side (tanned on Anya Taylor-Joy at the Toronto International Film Festival in early September), and jersey dresses draped in the extensive shoulder on bulbous deviations. Or maybe rubber exercise bullets? They will probably look great in the photos, but on the track looked like nothing like an elevator of Brazilian buttocks that went wrong. A simple online dress made up of hundreds of ivory petals was a more modern and Licou version of the Dior Juno dress from 1949 now at the Met’s Costume Institute.
And there were more. There was a push-up between dressing and dressing during the day. There were knitting capes worn with jeans that also appeared in the men’s clothing show by Mr. Anderson, which was a kind of prelude to this collection, and a minimist with duck frills in the back (also in men’s clothing as a cargo shorts; Mr. Anderson is the first creative director Dior given the reins on both sides of the house). Hats that looked like a cross between a French military tricorne and the wings of a supersonic jet. And many design gestures that could be familiar to anyone who followed Mr. Anderson’s work in his previous concerts in Loewe and his own brand, JW Anderson.
There was a lot, including a sense of playful in clothing that has not been seen at Dior for a long time.
What was not, really, was a clear proposition of who could be exactly the Dior woman of Mr. Anderson – except that she likes to experiment, does not particularly like the agreement received and is probably not Mrs. Trump.
In an overview, Mr. Anderson positioned the disorder of the collection as deliberated, saying that he wanted his Dior to be a house with a little something for everyone. In practice, however, it seemed more vague. Which is not the same as shocking. Or horrible.
It is possible that the new Dior can bring some of its most classic customers to grasp their pearls and cry for help. But it would probably take an even more dramatic aesthetic upheaval (and in any case, there are chances that there will be many traditional things in stores). Despite the accumulation, it was not so scary after all. Although it was a kind of cry.
