No manager required? Team Dior score a winner at Paris Fashion Week
Dior is currently missing a creative director, but you wouldn’t necessarily know it. The venue for the autumn/winter 2016 show – in the opulently oppressive 17th Century courtyard of the Louvre – was as lavish as ever. Inside the temporary structure, a series of mirrors and arches created a hermetic bubble that was part Frieze contemporary art fair, part futuristic airport - the twin jet engines of the modern power-brand.
Raf Simons, Dior’s most recent creative director, left last autumn, after failing to reach an agreement on his new contract. In the three years he was there, Simons, a keen collector of contemporary art, did much to foster the label’s artistic links. Since fashion is almost touchingly in awe of all art, this immediately changed external perceptions of Dior. Instead of being a ladies-who-lunch label, it acquired an avant-garde veneer, stocked, inter alia, in Dover Street Market, the London-based department store (with outposts in New York and Tokyo), whose approval is viewed, in the fashion world, as the golden ticket.
That wasn’t Simons’ only legacy. He revisited Christian Dior’s archives, dusting off the Bar Jacket (first seen in 1947’s New Look), revived Dior’s off the shoulder necklines and plunged into the floral prints.
All these elements were in this new collection. Sprigged flowers and delicate fauna were printed and embroidered onto high-waisted, slashed narrow skirts and fold-neck dresses. Jackets were patterned or scrupulously plain, sometimes reworked as coats. The off-the shoulder silhouetted played out repeatedly: on dresses, jackets and coats, sometimes layered over zippered blousons or floral shirts, for a double-neckline effect.
The results were mostly sleek and striking and it was instructive to see how Dior’s codes – the peplum jackets, sloping necklines and swing coats - can be endlessly reworked to look extravagant and jewelled or monochromatically minimalist. In fact the more Simon’s ideas are repeated, the better they look, their kinks ironed out.
The accessories were good too: an elegant lace up, mid height scooped-out ankle boot and tiny embroidered bags with wide, bandolier straps bang on trend (a thick contrasting strap may be all that’s required to update your bag net winter: this trend is everywhere). There was even a genuinely useful innovation: sunglasses cases with straps that can be slung across the body.
Clearly Dior’s (uncredited) design team is commendably competent at holding the fort (they did it before, following John Galliano's dismissal) and working to an agreed blueprint. Sometimes, Dior’s management must be tempted to carry on indefinitely in this vein, given how hard it seems to be to fill the top slot here.
However, if Dior is to flourish in the long term, it needs to appoint a designer and soon. As Gucci’s current revival demonstrates, a singular vision still trumps consensus.
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