One of the most prominent jewellery trends to emerge from the resurgence of maximalism is layering necklaces. Although the style is about making a statement, it also feels casual – the throwing of styles on top of one another to create something coherent. But if you’re looking for lower-effort still, many jewellery designers have created ready-made stacked styles.

How to layer necklaces

The layered necklace look might look like an afterthought, but there is method to the madness. The trick is variation – combining different styles, lengths and even metals.

Balance is key: think about a graduation of length, from chokers to plunging pendant necklaces, and mix sleek, minimalist pieces with chunkier, more detailed statements. Numerous textures will also help to create variety: snake chains, rolo chains, rope chains, and so forth. Don’t be afraid to mix stones and metals or add beads, pearls and pendants, from charms to T-bars. Start with just two or three necklaces, and then layer on as many as you feel works.

To prevent tangling, you can try clipping the clasp from one necklace to the extension of another, allowing you to change their lengths.

A necklace detangler may also come in useful: you can attach multiple necklaces to this accessory, which essentially turns them into one multi-chain necklace, keeping them separated on your neck so that they don't twist around each other.

Wallpaper’s favourite layering necklaces

Christian Dior was notoriously superstitious, and lucky charms, from the Rose des Vents eight-pointed star to the fer à cheval (horseshoe), are synonymous with the history of his namesake house. But it is le muguet – the lily of the valley, the designer’s favourite flower – that is perhaps the most enduring symbol of his legacy.

To Monsieur Dior, the lily of the valley’s delicate white blossoms and sweet yet verdant aroma ushered in the beginning of springtime. And with it, the promise of new beginnings that the season connotes. A constant presence in his life and work, sprigs of the flower were pinned to lapels and hemmed into the linings of garments. It even inspired entire collections, such as the S/S 1954 Muguet collection, and the embroidered and ruffled Muguet dress, created in 1957 as an homage to the couturier’s beloved bloom.

During the years in between, Christian Dior and nose Edmond Roudnitska produced Diorissimo: the first fragrance from the house inspired by the lily of the valley. In perfumery, however, the muguet is considered to be an ‘invisible’ flower; that is, it cannot be distilled into a pure fragrance, only replicated or reimagined using other ingredients.

Francis Kurkdijan, Dior’s Perfume Creation Director, now introduces an exceptional example of this in Le Muguet, the first chapter of a new collection called Les Récoltes Majeures. This trio of fragrances is built around three different flowers central to the story of the house, each contained in an artisanal amphora bottle. Here, Kurkdijan speaks with Wallpaper* about the technical, yet no less poetic process, of bringing Le Muguet to life.

Dior’s Les Récoltes Majeures: Le Muguet by Francis Kurkdijan

Wallpaper*: How did you approach the research process for Le Muguet, the first fragrance in the Les Récoltes Majeures collection?

Francis Kurkdijan: It all began when I joined the House of Dior in 2021. I immediately began researching the specific variety of lily of the valley that Christian Dior loved, called Fortin’s Giant, or Nantes, which he asked his florist in Paris to grow in a dedicated greenhouse that was also heated in winter. That way, it could grow all year round, and he could always have the flower on site in Paris.

Over the decades since, this particular species has been lost to history, and I wanted to rediscover it. A very close friend of mine is a lily producer, so I asked him to do some research to find out how we could reintroduce it to the gardens of La Colle Noire, Christian Dior’s château in Grasse. There was a specific bush behind the fountain on the left side of the house, which we know is where he planted the flower originally, and so this is where we also planted it.

W*: What makes this particular species of lily of the valley so special in terms of its aroma?

FK: The flower is a bit smaller than the lilies we are familiar with today. But it’s much more fragrant. In the making of Le Muguet, we used the ‘Headspace’ technique – an extraction procedure that was developed in the 1970s, but is, of course, much more technologically advanced today. It analyses the fragrant molecules of flowers that can’t be transformed into essential oils. So it helps perfumers to analyse the smell of an object, providing data that captures its DNA; all the different facets that make up its scent.

W*: Can you explain a little more about how the technique works?

FK: To give you a practical example, it’s like analysing the components of a colour. If there is a very specific shade of pink that you want to recreate, you need to know the ratios of red, blue, white, and so on. Perhaps this shade of pink has something else in it that you can’t see with your eye, but you can feel it’s there. In terms of scent, Headspace allows us to see these ratios. At the very end of this analysis, you are presented with the composition of what the flower is made of. Once you get that, you can recreate the smell using different ingredients.

W*: What influence did Diorissimo, the iconic lily of the valley fragrance created by Christian Dior and Edmond Roudnitska in 1956, have on Le Muguet?

FK: Diorissimo set the foundations for what a lily of the valley fragrance is for the entire world of modern perfumery. Since then, every single lily of the valley perfume released to the market smells somewhat alike, because they are based around the same canvas: usually a combination of roses, jasmine and ylang ylang. So Le Muguet is a departure from Diorissimo. My take was to change the paradigm. And instead of starting with Diorissimo, I decided to go a step before that, meaning my point of reference should be the aroma of the flower itself.

W*: With this in mind, how did you arrive at Le Muguet’s final composition?

FK: When I looked at the result of the Headspace analysis, I noticed that this particular species of lily of the valley can be experienced as a ‘green almond’. There was a different idea here. It was a shift from how the lily of the valley was defined by Diorissimo. With Le Muguet, we got rid of the animalic component of the lily of the valley, by removing the ylang ylang. So here, I was able to present a new vision. The idea was to mimic nature; to recreate the flower as Christian Dior would have smelled it blooming. So Le Muguet is built around Grasse centifolia rose and jasmine.

W*: Of course, Le Muguet is highly connected to springtime. As a perfumer, what does the season mean to you?

FK: The springtime is exciting: it’s a signal for flowers to bloom. It’s a sign for nature to awaken… A renaissance. The days are longer and more luminous. The light is sharper. The seasons are always important to what I do, especially the climate in France. I love the sun, the clouds and the rain. The cold and the heat. All of it.

dior.com

September, so said legendary American Vogue editor Candy Pratts, is the January of fashion. Following a brief summer break after the conclusions of menswear and haute couture – which took place over June and July – Women’s Fashion Week S/S 2025 arrives in New York next week on September 6 2024, with subsequent stops in London, Milan and Paris. Think of it as a new fashion term.

The schedule is now set, with a few surprises along the way. Among them, the news that Pieter Mulier will show his next Alaïa collection in the city on September 6, heralding the start of fashion month. It is over four decades since the house’s eponymous founder, Azzedine Alaïa, first showed in the American city, when he presented a collection in September 1982 to an audience which included Andy Warhol and Paloma Picasso. No doubt Mulier – who has garnered plenty of high-profile devotees of his own – will draw a similarly starry crowd. Meanwhile, Ralph Lauren will show the day prior with a special show in the Hamptons on September 5. London-based label Cos has also announced a return to New York, having shown last season in Rome.

Elsewhere, it will no doubt be the season of debuts: chief among them is the much-anticipated arrival of Alessandro Michele at Valentino, who will show as part of Paris Fashion Week. Eyes will also be on Givenchy, Chanel and Dries Van Noten which – at the time of writing – are each without creative directors.

Here, everything Wallpaper* knows about Women’s Fashion Week S/S 2025.

Women’s Fashion Week S/S 2025: what to expect

New York Fashion Week S/S 2025 (6 – 11 September 2024)

New York Fashion Week S/S 2025 will begin – unofficially – on September 5, as American fashion behemoth (and member of the Wallpaper* USA 400) Ralph Lauren presents his latest collection in an exclusive show in the Hamptons, the beachside Long Island locale which has long played host to the rich and famous. ’The Hamptons is more than a place,’ said Lauren in a statement. ’It’s a natural world of endless blue skies, the ocean, green fields, and white fences, rusticity and elegance with a quality of light that drew artists here decades ago. It has been home, my refuge and always an inspiration.’

The day afterwards, Pieter Mulier will show his latest Alaïa collection in New York, four decades after Azzedine Alaïa first showed in the city in 1982. It will be his second time showing outside of Paris – an intimate show at the designer’s brutalist home in Antwerp, Belgium took place in 2023 – and will no doubt be one of the highlights of the schedule. ’A city close to Pieter Mulier’s heart and the maison’s,’ said Alaïa on Instagram. It will be accompanied by ‘a series of exclusive moments’ which will take place in the city from 6–8 September. Meanwhile Cos – which last season showed at Corsie Sistine in Rome – will return to New York with a show on September 10 in Brooklyn. ‘New York is a dynamic city with so much character – it’s a place of inspiration, full of interesting and creative people,’ says the brand’s design director Karin Gustafson. Another new arrival is Off-White, who under creative director Ib Kamara will swap Paris for New York, showing on the afternoon of Sunday 16 (the title of the show is ‘Duty Free' and will take place at Brooklyn Bridge Park). Nanushka will also debut at the week, showing on the afternoon of September 7.

Elsewhere, expect a continuation of the Tory Burch renaissance as the designer presents her S/S 2025 collection on the evening of Monday 17, while New York stalwarts Coach, Michael Kors and Carolina Herrera will all show during the week. Wallpaper* USA 400 members Willy Chavarria and Peter Do, the latter showing his third collection for Helmut Lang, will round out the schedule, alongside rising names Zankov and Diotima. Tommy Hilfiger has also confirmed a spot on the week’s schedule, having initially been absent. He will show his latest collection at 6.30pm on Sunday 16.

London Fashion Week S/S 2025 (12 – 17 September 2024)

Beginning slightly earlier this season to avoid a clash with Milan Fashion Week (which starts this season on September 17), London Fashion Week will continue its 40th birthday celebrations with a packed schedule comprising the usual slew of energetic, emerging labels amid a smattering of more well-established names. Of the latter, Burberry will remain the chief draw for international editors visiting the city – Daniel Lee will show his fourth runway collection for the British label – while JW Anderson will present another agenda-setting collection on Sunday morning, his usual slot.

Other names showing this season are Simone Rocha, Roksanda, Erdem, Ahluwalia and Aaron Esh, alongside a new edition of London-based incubator Fashion East (participants are yet to be announced). Watch out for Derrick – Luke Derrick’s burgeoning London-based label had plenty of buzz last season for its sleek, contemporary riff on men’s tailoring – and Nensi Dojaka, who returns to the schedule after a hiatus. Feben will also return to London, having shown last season with the support of Dolce & Gabbana in Milan. Look out too for the rebirth of Kent & Curwen, with the British label having been purchased by Chinese golf brand Biem.L.Fdlkk Garment in 2023.

London Fashion Week will also have a new home this season, the central Newgen space moving from Old Selfridges Hotel back to 180 Strand.

Milan Fashion Week S/S 2025 (17 – 23 September 2024)

Milan Fashion Week will run a day longer this season, part of a re-jigging of the fashion month schedule led by Camera della Moda, the week’s organising body. ’I’m very satisfied with this synergetic effort by the four main players on the fashion circuit,’ said the organisation’s president Carlo Capasa. ’[We] had for some time been asking for an extension of the Milan Fashion Week, given its calendar of over 200 appointments.’

As such, the week will begin with Fendi on September 17, the Roman house presenting its S/S 2025 collection at 3pm (this time, the show will take place on a Tuesday, as opposed to its usual Wednesday). Elsewhere, expect a continuation of Prada’s ‘fairytale ravescape’ set which it revealed as its menswear show in June (the house’s womenswear sets usually riff on their menswear predecessors ), alongside similarly blockbuster shows from Gucci, Versace, Ferragamo, Dolce & Gabbana and Bottega Veneta.

Absent from this season’s schedule is Tom Ford – after the departure of creative director Peter Hawkings earlier this month – and Giorgio Armani, the latter showing in New York off-schedule in October. Also currently absent are MSGM and Blumarine (David Koma will show his debut as creative director next season), while Central Saint Martins graduate Susan Fang will show with the support of Dolce & Gabbana on Sunday morning.

Paris Fashion Week S/S 2025 (23 September – October 1 2024)

No doubt the biggest moment of Paris Fashion Week will be the arrival of Alessandro Michele at Valentino, who will present his first runway show this September (the ex-Gucci creative director’s first collection for the house, titled ’Avant les Débuts’ was revealed in a surprise lookbook drop this past June). ‘It’s an incredible honour for me to be welcomed at Maison Valentino. I feel the immense joy and the huge responsibility to join a maison de couture that has the word “beauty” carved on a collective story, made of distinctive elegance, refinement and extreme grace,’ said Michele in a statement issued after his appointment in March 2024. He will show on the afternoon of Sunday 29.

A number of other houses – among them Givenchy, Dries Van Noten and Chanel – are currently without creative directors. Givenchy is absent from the schedule (the new creative director will likely debut in February 2025), Dries Van Noten is slated to show on the afternoon of Wednesday 25 (it will be the first show since the eponymous creative director exited in June), and Chanel will retain its usual spot on the morning of Tuesday 1 October. An otherwise busy schedule – as has become the norm for the city – will include shows from Loewe, Louis Vuitton, Rick Owens, Dior, Saint Laurent, Hermès and more. Balenciaga, meanwhile, will show on the evening of Monday 30, shifting from Sunday morning.

In other news, Paris label Coperni will host its S/S 2025 show on October 1, 2024 at the so-called happiest place on earth – Disneyland Paris. Founders Arnaud Vaillant and Sébastien Meyer have said the collection will blend ‘magic with reality, paying tribute to the beloved Walt Disney Animation Studios movies of our childhood’. Meanwhile Ganni, the stalwart of Copenhagen Fashion Week, will shift to Paris this season, following the appointment of Laura du Rusquec, previously of Balenciaga, as CEO this past April.

Stay tuned for more from Women’s Fashion Month S/S 2025.

Throughout his career so far, British designer Kim Jones has proved adept at channelling the energy of subculture into the vaunted ateliers of Paris’ historic houses. At Dior, a heady infusion of salon and street has seen him celebrate five years as artistic director of the men’s collections – a veritable lifetime in the spinning merry-go-round of creative directors elsewhere.

The S/S 2024 anniversary collection – which references the work of previous Dior creative directors Marc Bohan, Gianfranco Ferré, Yves Saint Laurent and Christian Dior himself – sees footwear inspired by Ray Petri’s Buffalo Collective, a rebellious British creative movement which would come to reshape the landscape of 1980s fashion. Here, Buffalo’s signature chunky, lugged-sole loafer is rendered in silver-toned tweed decorated with the house’s emblematic cannage motif – a symbolic clash of agitator and establishment.

A closer look at Kim Jones’ S/S 2024 Dior Men accessories

Meanwhile, the same fabric adorns a new version of the house’s saddle bag, a perennial accessory first introduced by John Galliano in 2000. This functional riff, the ‘Saddle Twin’ bag, comes with a removable handle and adjustable calfskin strap, allowing it to be carried in a multitude of ways: clutched in the hand, as a cross body, or looped over the shoulder.

‘Dior is an haute couture house... at the heart of Dior is silhouette, shape, technique and fabrication of the very highest order. I like to think that in my five years of being here I have never forgotten this,’ Jones said after the show. ’It’s a culture we have inherited from womenswear past and applied to menswear present. And for the first time in our collections, it is a collage of influences from different Dior predecessors and eras we wanted to pay tribute to at once – together with some of our own.’

A version of this article appears in the April 2024 issue of Wallpaper*, available in print, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today.

Set design: Thomas Conant. Photography assistant: Matt Bramston

The Dior Men S/S 2024 collection is available now on dior.com.

dior.com

In 1947, Christian Dior launched his fashion house with a collection that charmed and markedly changed the industry. Paris had been liberated from Nazi occupation three years earlier, while Dior’s own emancipation from Lucien Lelong, for whom he’d been designing since 1942, arrived in 1946. Labelled the ‘New Look’ by Carmel Snow, the acclaimed editor-in-chief of Harper’s Bazaar, the collection made a compelling argument for excess after post-war austerity. The bar suit in particular, comprised of an ivory, wasp-waisted jacket and full, pleated black skirt, was quickly championed for its dramatic new silhouette. Now, adopting its moniker from Snow’s baptism, a new ten-part drama from Apple TV+ titled The New Look excavates fashion history, tracing Dior’s professional and personal life during the Second World War and leading up to the New Look. 

’The New Look’ on Apple TV+

‘My grandmother used to talk about it,’ says the show’s costume designer, Karen Muller Serreau, recalling her introduction to Dior’s celebrated silhouette. ‘For her, the New Look had the feeling of future and hope.’ Conceived by Todd A Kessler, we first meet Dior (Ben Mendelsohn) backstage at the Sorbonne in 1955, where he is to give a speech to a hall full of enthusiastic design students. An audience question takes us back to 1943, and for much of the show’s run we’re privy to the hardships of occupied Paris, a restrictive environment that would ultimately provide the New Look its power. ‘I can understand how it brought hope to people,’ continues Muller Serreau. ‘We were building up to it as we worked, so when we came to the part with the bar suit, we felt like people then must have – a sense of wow, and this relief to have cloth and a full skirt.’

Running parallel to the Dior narrative, which sees him crafting party frocks for Nazi officer’s wives (a way for him survive the war), drinking with his contemporaries Pierre Balmain and Cristóbal Balenciaga, and worrying about his sister Catherine (Maisie Williams), imprisoned at a labour camp for her efforts in the French Resistance, is the story of Coco Chanel (Juliette Binoche). While Lelong kept his atelier open for the duration of the war, Chanel shut up shop, supposedly as an act of patriotism, though the show depicts the couturier living at The Ritz where she conducts an affair with a Nazi agent. The rest of The New Look charts the pair’s rivalry, and the changing fortunes of their eponymous houses. On-screen, clothing is largely employed as a vehicle for storytelling, while fashion and creativity are presented as a means for survival, as Mendelsohn’s Dior announces at the Sorbonne. 

Binoche and Williams’ characters in particular were the most fun to dress, says the costume designer, while Chanel was also the most challenging. ‘There aren't many pictures from during that period in her life, so it was [a question of] looking at before and after for inspiration,’ she notes, ‘[of] trying to get the essence and feel of her right, but not have her wearing what everybody knows.’ Chanel’s own rulebook was a valuable tool, and the designer’s famous directive to remove the last piece of jewellery you put on was frequently followed. ‘Catherine’s really interesting too, because she’s Dior’s sister and had been his model in her younger days,’ adds Muller Serreau. ‘But she’s then working for the resistance, so wanting to disappear, not be noticed in the outside world. It was always about pulling her back and making her sort of ordinary. She goes through several stages, so building the character was good fun.’

This disparity between the high glamour world that Dior and his peers were creating and the reality of war time, and subsequently Dior’s New Look and the rich attire of the editors who attended his debut, was keenly observed during production, says Muller Serreau. ‘There was this real contrast all the time, from wartime to a fashion show. That was kind of interesting,’ she explains. ‘I'd go from one part of the workshop where we were working on skimpy, dull-coloured outfits and then at the other end, there'd be these beautiful satin and silk things being worked on. We only had two scripts at a time, so we didn't ever quite know what was going to happen afterwards. We were always surprised.’

The New Look is available to stream on Apple TV+ now.

apple.com

While even the most fastidious of forecasters could not predict with any certainty the ins and outs of the coming year in style – and the clothing we’ll be desiring when the year is out – there remains plenty we do already know about fashion in 2024, whether the usual roll-call of designer moves and debuts, the arrival of a star-studded Apple TV+ drama on Christian Dior and his mid-century milieu, or an intriguing, century-spanning theme for this year’s Met Gala.  

On the cusp of a new year, everything to look forward to in fashion in 2024 (so far).

Fashion in 2024: what to look forward to (so far)

A roll-call of designers will make their debuts

Fashion’s merry-go-round continued in 2023 with a slew of designer exits, among them Sarah Burton at Alexander McQueen, Gabriela Hearst at Chloé, and earlier this month, Matthew M Williams, who said goodbye to Givenchy. 

As such – although the latter’s successor is so far unnamed – there will be a roll-call of designers making their debut at major houses in 2024. Watch out for Seán McGirr at Alexander McQueen (the northern Irish designer was formerly head of menswear at JW Anderson), Chemena Kamali at Chloé (she returns to the house where she started her career after working at Saint Laurent), and former Tod’s creative director Walter Chiapponi who will begin his tenure at Blumarine (while at Tod’s, he is succeeded by Matteo Tamburini, most recently of Bottega Veneta). 

A number of these debuts – particularly McGirr’s – will likely spark conversation from both those inside and outside of the fashion ranks after the designer’s appointment raised questions about the continued prevalence of white, male creative directors (an Instagram post from a London-based publication on the subject by 1 Granary, posted just after McGirr’s appointment, went viral on the subject). Recruiters at Givenchy will no doubt have this on their minds when selecting Williams’ successor. 

The Met Gala theme is all about sleeping beauties

Following 2023’s ‘Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty’ – a blockbuster exhibition on the inimitable German designer’s expansive oeuvre, from Chloé to Chanel – this year’s annual Costume Institute exhibition at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art is altogether more abstract. Titled ’Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion’ (May 10 – September 2, 2024), it will comprise 250 garments – spanning designers, centuries and countries – promising a reexamination of ‘masterworks’ from the museum’s collection using cutting-edge technology, from X-ray to AI. 

Meanwhile, the sensory elements of the various items – and the eras in which they originated – will be highlighted in immersive ‘activations’ conveying ‘the smells, sounds, textures, and motions of garments that can no longer directly interact with the body’. Loewe will be the year’s fashion sponsor, with Jonathan Anderson’s ghostly Gerhard Richter-inspired dresses from the house’s A/W 2023 show – simple silk shifts printed with the ‘memories’ of previous garments – will feature in the exhibition. On the red carpet, meanwhile – the exhibition is celebrated by the accompanying Met Gala on the first Monday in May – the somewhat indeterminate theme, will no doubt provide some interesting (and outré) looks from the phalanx of celebrities who attend each year. 

Christian Dior’s life will be explored in new Apple TV+ show

Dramatisations and biopics of fashion designer’s lives have been somewhat patchy – perhaps the best in recent years, A Phantom Thread, was entirely fictionalised – though an upcoming television series on Apple TV+ has a promising pedigree. Titled ‘The New Look’, the Todd A. Kessler-created show – a director and screenwriter
who worked on The Sopranos and Damages, earning a slew of Emmys – will explore the lives of Christian Dior, Coco Chanel and several other of the era’s designers in the wake of World War II and the occupation of France. The title refers to Dior’s ‘New Look’ – epitomised by his narrow-waisted bar jacket and full, abundant skirt – a riposte to the restraint of the war era and a silhouette which would define mid-century fashion.

An award-winning cast – first revealed this past November – will take on the well-known roster of characters, including Emmy winner Ben Mendelsohn as Christian Dior, Academy Award winner Juliette Binoche as Coco Chanel, Maisie Williams as Catherine Dior, the couturier’s sister, and John Malkovich as French couturier Lucien Lelong. Meanwhile, an ‘immersive and contemporary’ soundtrack is created by Grammy Award winner Jack Antonoff, the producer behind albums by Lana del Rey, Taylor Swift and Lorde.

So far, so intriguing – the series will premiere on February 14, 2024 on Apple TV+, just in time for fashion month (expect it to be a front-row talking point). 

At Pitti, two guest designers who explore queer life and class

Though the centrepiece of Pitti Uomo is the vast exhibition centre in the 14th-century Fortezza da Basso – which sees brands from around the world pitch up to display their latest collections – it is the Florentine menswear fair’s ‘guest designers’ which provide its most intriguing moments. Previous editions have hosted shows from the likes of Raf Simons, Martine Rose, Grace Wales Bonner, Jonathan Anderson and Craig Green alongside fashion houses Givenchy, Jil Sander and Fendi. 

This season, two young designers – from Italy and the UK respectively – will show their latest collections as guests of the fair. The first is Bologna-born Luca Magliano, whose eponymous label Magliano has won plaudits – including the LVMH Prize’s Karl Lagerfeld Prize – for its skewed, irreverent plays on classic Italian dress codes, deeply rooted in his beloved hometown where he continues to live and work (’provincia’ is the word he uses to describe his fascination with regional eccentricities). Bologna’s history of protest – particularly among the large student and working-class community – also informs his liberatory collections, as does growing up within the city’s queer and subcultural scenes. He will show at the Nelson Mandela Forum, a stadium to the east of Florence. 

Steven Stokey-Daley – founder of S.S. Daley – also explores class and sexuality through theatrical collections which are informed by his observations of the British upper classes, both real and imagined (while at university in London, his campus would look out on the playing fields of public school Harrow; Stokey-Daley describes himself as ‘a working class boy’). Collections have riffed on the upstairs-downstairs archetype in Britsh culture and literature, with figures like Virginia Woolf, Vita Sackville West and Evelyn Waugh inspiring his collections. He has chosen the perennial Florence landmark Palazzo Vecchio to show his A/W 2024 collection.

Two UK exhibitions will celebrate the greats of British fashion

A duo of exhibitions, opening in March and June respectively, will tell the stories behind some of Britain’s most widely-known fashion names. The first, which takes place at the historic Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire, is titled ‘Icons of British Style’ (23 March – 30 June, 2024) and will see garments from a wide-ranging array of designers and brands – from Vivienne Westwood and Stephen Jones to Stella McCartney and Barbour – alongside an accompanying array of archival materials, drawings, photography and pattern pieces. Though the draw is undoubtedly the surroundings, with the exhibition winding through Blenheim’s great hall and through the palace, which has a longtime link to fashion – in 1954, Christian Dior hosted a couture show in the home for style-conscious members of Britain’s aristocracy (in a nod to its heritage, Jones’ millinery for Dior will feature).

The second, at London’s V&A Museum, takes Naomi Campbell as its subject, promising an unprecedented glimpse into the British supermodel’s life and wardrobe as she celebrates four decades in fashion (born in Lambeth, she was discovered by Pennington Models aged just 15). Titled ‘Naomi’ (22 June – 6 April 2025), the no-doubt high-octane exhibition will be a glamourous walk-through her career, promising cameos from the seminal designers who shaped her as a model – among them Gianni Versace, Azzedine Alaïa and Yves Saint Laurent, whose clothes will also feature in the exhibition. A vast array of photography, curated by former British Vogue editor-in-chief Edward Enninful, will appear alongside, while footage of her legendary runway walk, will no doubt feature.

While in Milan, a seminal fashion store will be reborn

10 Corso Como is one of Milan’s – indeed, fashion’s – most well-known addresses, the site of Carla Sozzani’s 1980-founded store-café-cum-hotel-cum-cultural outpost of the same name. In 2024, the store will get a makeover of sorts in a project titled ‘Rethinking 10 Corso Como’ which promises to create a ‘wunderkammer’ or cabinet of curiosities in the space, alongside a thriving program of events (these will include exhibitions curated by art critic Alessandro Rabottini and fashion lecturer and curator Alessio de’ Navasques). 

The heavy architectural lifting, meanwhile, will be done by Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli – a former OMA partner and president of the international jury at the 2023 Venice Biennale Architecture Exhibition – who will renovate the space through a series of ‘micro-interactions’ which will allow visits to seamlessly transition between the various zones. The work began in November 2023, with the new 10 Corso Como being revealed in stages beginning in spring 2024. Watch this space. 

‘We should all be feminists’ – so read a T-shirt in Maria Grazia Chiuri’s debut show as womenswear creative director of Dior, shown in September 2016. It was a garment that would prove prescient to the Italian designer’s tenure at the house so far – for one, her collections have been infused with a celebration of powerful, creative femininity, and secondly, it was taken from a work by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, a precursor for the wide-ranging collaborations with women artists that have followed. These have included a show set by Judy Chicago, a photographic tome by Brigitte Niedermair, and the invitation to Grace Wales Bonner to give her riff on the house’s bar jacket as part of Chiuri’s Cruise 2020 collection.

La Galerie Dior exhibition celebrates women artists

It is in this spirit that a new exhibition opens at La Galerie Dior, the house’s recently inaugurated museum at 30 Avenue Montaigne (opening 75 years after Christian Dior presented his first collection there, the renovated hôtel particulier also houses a vast new flagship store, restaurant and luxury private suite, where VIP shoppers can stay overnight). The exhibition celebrates Dior’s ongoing collaboration with women artists – particularly under Chiuri – as well as notable personalities from the house’s history. As with all of Dior’s projects, the exhibition is rooted in the house founder’s life and design philosophy; in this case, the exhibition recalls Christian Dior’s own love of art, having begun his career as a gallery owner. Art, design, music and literature would continue to inform his collections until his death in 1957.

As such, one of the exhibition’s most precious objects is a 1930s painting by female Surrealist artist Leonora Carrington, which Christian Dior displayed while he was a gallerist (ever the soothsayer, Carrington’s work has recently enjoyed a renaissance, featuring prominently in the Tate’s ‘Surrealism Beyond Borders’ in 2022). Another figure in the exhibition is Niki de Saint Phalle, the American painter and sculptor whose colourful works would inspire Marc Bohan, the house’s creative director from the 1960s through to the 1980s. Later, Grazia Chiuri would use this relationship as inspiration for her own S/S 2018 collection.

Elsewhere, the exhibition explores the works of the numerous artists who have collaborated with Grazia Chiuri, among them Eva Jospin, Brigitte Lacombe and Katerina Jebb – their various works providing reflections of the designer’s collections. Completing the exhibition are different interpretations of the Lady Dior handbag, created by female artists as part of the house’s Lady Art project. Displayed as a wunderkammer of curiosities, the designs demonstrate the breadth of Grazia Chiuri’s collaborative project, one that continued this past fashion week when she united with Italian artist Elena Bellantoni on the set for her S/S 2024 ready-to-wear collection. There, enormous screens flashed between Bellantoni’s playful send-offs of sexist advertisements, from the 1950s to now.

The exhibition runs from 24 November 2023 to 13 May 2024 at La Galerie Dior, Paris. 

galeriedior.com

Christian Dior’s lifelong love of horticulture was born in childhood, watching his mother Madeleine tend the garden at the family’s seaside home, Villa Les Rhumbs in Granville, Normandy. Exposed to the elements, the house’s windswept clifftop grounds nonetheless cultivated an edenic array of flora, including Madeleine’s treasured rose garden, where over 20 varieties bloomed. Flowers would become a perennial motif in the couturier’s work; later in life, he would cultivate a garden of his own at Le Moulin du Coudret, just outside of Paris. ‘My life and style owe almost everything to Les Rhumbs,’ he said. 

A century on, such flowers adorn the limited-edition Dior gardening shoes created in a collaboration between the house’s menswear creative director Kim Jones and historic German shoe manufacturer Birkenstock. A riff on Birkenstock’s ergonomic Tokio Mule – a rubber mudguard and nubuck leather ankle strap are added to the original style – the grey felt slippers combine ornamental embellishment with utilitarian design, a balance Jones has struck in his menswear collections at the house so far. Here, delicate hand-embroidered flowers and foliage meet Jones’ futuristic aluminium ‘rollercoaster’ buckle – an expression of heritage and modernity at once.

Dior by Birkenstock

The collaboration was first revealed as part of an A/W22 collection in which Jones noted an imagined conversation with Monsieur Dior through the ‘virtuoso savoir-faire’ which defines the Parisian house – from flights of intricate embroidery and embellishment, to plays on the house founder’s seminal 1947 Bar jacket (which this year celebrates its 75th anniversary, see W*282). Other footwear styles in the collaboration include the Tokio Mule in brown, greige and black nubuck calfskin, and a version of Birkenstock’s two-strap Milano sandal. Each pair is completed with a unique tread which melds Dior’s ‘Oblique’ monogram with Birkenstock’s ‘Bones’ motif, a symbolic union of two bastions of construction and craft.

Model: Dhillon at Kult Models. Casting: Svea Casting. Hair: Sky Cripps-Jackson using Davines. Make-up: Victoria Martin using Rationale. Manicure: Sasha Goddard at Saint Luke using Dior Manicure Collection and Miss Dior Hand Cream. Set design: Staci Lee Hindley. Set assistants: Luke Spence. Photography assistants: Ben Butcher, Millie Noble, Alys Morrison. Fashion assistant: Kris Bergfeldt. 

A version of this article appears in the December 2022 issue of Wallpaper*, available in print, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today.

dior.com
birkenstock.com

Paris Fashion Week S/S 2023 looks set to round out fashion month in climatic manner – from spectacular shows courtesy of France’s historic houses (Louis Vuitton, Dior, Chanel, Saint Laurent and Hermès among them) to a new wave of emerging designers showing across the city (Ester Manas, Ludovic de Saint Sernin, Ottolinger and more), Europe’s spiritual home of fashion feels as energised as ever. New additions to the nine-day schedule include Victoria Beckham, in her Paris debut, Ib Kamara, who reveals his vision as art and image director of Off-White, and a contingent of Japanese designers making their womenswear return after two years of Covid-19 restrictions, including Comme des Garçons, Junya Watanabe and Yohji Yamamato (Issey Miyake will also show its first collection since the eponymous founder’s death earlier this year). 

Here is the best of Paris Fashion Week S/S 2023.

The best of Paris Fashion Week S/S 2023

Tuesday 2 October

Louis Vuitton

Louis Vuitton’s show set – a ‘pulsating monster flower’ by artist Philippe Parreno – acted something like a funhouse hall of mirrors, with rows of flashing light bulbs and slowly turning mirrors altering perceptions of perspective and scale. Something similar happened in the collection itself, which Nicolas Ghesquière said had a focus on femininity – ‘glorifying its complexity, magnifying it, putting it in the spotlight’. As such, zip pulls were blown up to the size of a hand; vast eyelet belts were printed onto perforated leather tailoring; huge pochette handbags, decorated with the Louis Vuitton monogram, appeared like one of the house’s purses had been multiplied to several times its size. ‘It's a stylistic exercise that re-evaluates the proportions of clothing and its adjuncts, one in which the codes of femininity unsettle scale,’ explained the collection notes. ‘The infinitely large and the infinitely small come together on silhouettes, inviting a second look.’ The result was something both tough and playful at once; a near-fetishistic celebration of the elements which make Louis Vuitton unique – the symbolic monogram, the hardware of its handbags – zoomed in, highlighted, ‘given their due’. ‘These are the custodians of a story that endures.’

Miu Miu

Recent seasons have seen Miuccia Prada – at both Miu Miu and her eponymous label – search for what she called ‘the idea of directness’ last month after her and Raf Simons’ S/S 2023 Prada show in Milan. It has meant an exploration of archetypal, near-banal garments; this season at Miu Miu, the opening look comprised two layered T-shirts and a featherweight knit on top, recalling undergarments in their simplicity. ‘This collection is about fashion born from reality, and born for reality, to be placed back into that context,’ she elucidated in the show notes. ‘[It] is not a time for meaningless fashion.’

This idea of utility ran throughout the collection. Lightweight nylon parkas became zip-up dresses. Wide bum bags with two large front pockets – in denim or nylon – sat low on the waist. Adjustable toggle fastenings ran throughout; nylon bustiers fastened with slide-release buckles. ‘This is not an easy moment to create fashion,’ she said. ‘For this collection, I wanted to explore the purpose of fashion, its reason. Its usefulness in society and in culture today.’

That said, moments of aesthetic rebellion emerged throughout – after all, Miu Miu describes itself as ‘rebellious and seductive’, ‘an unrestrained portrayal of Miuccia Prada’s creativity’. Hybrid flip-flop boots came in neon shades; smatterings of sequinned flowers decorated an otherwise simple T-shirt and skirt; unruly linings emerged from beneath the hem of a jacket. ‘Fashion can have a meaning and a reason beyond utility – to decorate, to attract, is a meaning. But it is important that fashion functions – I am not anti-luxury, but I am anti-ostentation.’

Chanel

In 1961, Gabrielle Chanel designed the dresses worn by French actress Delphine Seyrig in Alain Renais’ Last Year at Marienbad, a classic of French cinema’s new wave. For her S/S 2023 collection, artistic director Virginie Viard looked back towards this moment for a collection which mused more widely on film’s power to seduce. ‘The films we have seen, those that possess us and those we invent for ourselves,’ said Viard of the collection’s starting point. ‘Marienbad, the nouvelle vague, the allure according to Gabrielle Chanel, Karl [Lagerfeld], the night, feathers, sequins, heels.’

Such elements made for a deeply desirable collection from Viard, who is slowly making a signature at the house, defined by a feeling of simplicity, of stripping back, but nonetheless illuminated with subtle frissons of glamour and craft. Here, light touches of feather and delicate sparkling paillettes adorned beautifully cut tweed tailoring, the easy silhouette reminiscent of the costumes in Last Year at Marienbad and their simplicity of line. Elsewhere, patchwork motifs, photographic prints and subtly juxtaposed elements lent a feeling of collage. ‘I like it when things get mixed up,’ said Viard.

Another cinematic influence came from Kristen Stewart, the American actress and house muse. A film by Inez and Vinoodh starring Stewart played on the large screens which backdropped the runway; Stewart herself watched on from the front row. ‘Whether it's her, or the other women I dress, I need to feel that they like the clothes anyway,’ said Viard. ‘But, of the people around me, she is the closest to Gabrielle Chanel, at least to my idea of her. She understands Chanel, its clothes. And with her, it becomes even more modern. This collection, it’s also her.’

Monday 1 October

Rokh

At Rokh, Rok Hwang uses the archetypes of a woman’s wardrobe – the trench coat, the tailored suit, the classic blouse – as the starting point for his collections, mashing them up into complex hybrid garments which this season he characterised as ‘The Irrational View’, the collection’s title. ‘[It] joins together classic symbols of the wardrobe by applying multiple Rokh codes into one rationalised wardrobe with a modern perspective,’ explained the collection notes, with those codes spanning multiple buttons, diagonal cuttings, and ‘multi-size, unbalanced pleats’. It was the trench coat – a garment Hwang has explored in previous seasons – which became the collection’s nexus, reimagined in various shape-shifting forms, from a full-length skirt (as if the upper half of the trench had been taken clean away) to mini tailored jackets, made from sliced-up trench coats in subtly varying shades. An asymmetric silhouette ran throughout: plissé skirts had undulating hemlines, while dresses were cut diagonally so one side fell gently onto the floor. ‘Editing authenticity, adjusting identities,’ described Huang of the process. ‘Rationalising the irrational view across identities and wardrobes; new comprehensions found in repetitions of fitting, cutting during work in progress.’

Lanvin

A wistful S/S 2023 offering from Bruno Sialelli saw the French designer evoke ‘the emotions of couture and memories of Lanvin’ in a collection that looked towards the purity and refresh of springtime as inspiration. Refresh might be an apt word – after the high-glamour offerings of recent seasons, this was a more stripped-back approach, part of a move from the house to create a more expansive offering for its customer. Against the backdrop of a film by Joshua Woods, Sialelli proposed an array of elegant tailoring for the season – some left raw on the edges, ‘an exchange between the raw and the refined, the perfectly unfinished’ – often with just a singular button, which became symbolic of the collection’s reductionist outlook. Elsewhere, the influence of couture came in a feeling of craft: macramé vests and dresses were intricately crafted from embroidered silk soutache, while flowers became a delicate motif that reoccurred throughout. Pieces from Jeanne Lanvin’s own archive also provided inspiration for the collection – graphic prints from gentleman’s ties were printed onto radzimir and decorated dresses and skirts; Lanvin’s 1920s robe de style was reimagined in plissé silk chiffon. ‘An interplay of the rigour of couture with the impulse of emotion, an attitude of today with gestures that honour the past,’ said the house. ‘Simple pleasures, pure joys.’

Thom Browne

‘As you know, Thom likes to tell a story,’ said British actress Gwendoline Christie, the compère and protagonist for Thom Browne’s extravagant S/S 2023 presentation. A Cinderella story of sorts – a giant translucent slipper sat at one end of the runway, which wove around the gilded corridors of the Palais Garnier – the half-an-hour or so happening saw a collection that spanned vast taffeta opera coats (which were then removed, revealing spotted tailoring beneath, for the models’ second walk of the runway), punk-inspired get-ups (complete with liberty spiked hair), riffs on preppy American tailoring, before an all-out finale where Pose’s MJ Rodriguez zoomed around the venue in a shimmering floating car (the hood ornament a tiny recreation of Browne’s signature dachshund, Hector). The finale saw Christie transformed, wearing a white pleated opera coat – ‘the truest version of herself’ – zooming off into the sunset with Rodriguez. ‘In Thom Browne’s world,’ Christie said at the show’s close, ‘all girls and all boys fit inside the shoe.’

Sacai

Sacai’s Chitose Abe said she was thinking about freedom this season, noting a desire to create a collection encompassing feelings of ‘positivity, gentle strength, dignity and joy’. Amid an airy, light-filled showspace, lined with hundreds of cube-shaped stools in an array of primary colours, the collection encapsulated a carefree mood: oversized white shirting, jackets sliced along the sleeves for movement, dresses and skirts with deep utility-inspired pockets. As ever, Abe proposed a number of clever hybrid garments – the double-breasted blazer, for example, was reimagined as a sleeveless pleated top; trousers with apron-style pouches on the front – while moments of textural play, from shiny silver fabrications to shimmering sequins, set an optimistic mood. As one slogan T-shirt read: ‘I got a feeling it’s gon’ be alright.’ 

Sunday 2 October

Givenchy

A heavy downpour of rain might have threatened to disrupt Matthew M Williams’ first solo womenswear outing – previously, his women’s collections have appeared in co-ed shows – though a brief break in the clouds at showtime proved serendipitous (as if on cue, the rain began again as Williams took his runway bow). This season, Williams said he imagined a ‘transatlantic clash’, between his own native America and the city of Paris, where he now resides. ‘Through the timeless gaze of Hubert de Givenchy, whose contributions to American cinema inspired the nation’s perception of everyday elegance, the silhouettes of classic Parisian chic and casual Los Angeles cool consolidate,’ the house said in a statement. 

In the collection, this culture clash arose in an opposition between elegant black tailoring – one standout was a perfectly sculpted tuxedo jacket, panelled like a corset – and more casual 2000s-inflected elements, from knee-length cargo shorts and stone-washed denim to motorcycle-inspired handbags. A series of heavily embellished gowns in sequin and crystal were perhaps Williams’ most dressed-up proposition for the house yet – a nod to house founder Hubert de Givenchy’s innate command of eveningwear. ‘Everything begins with Hubert, the designer said. ‘I looked into his archives with my adopted Parisian eye, but also with my instinctive American eye. The cultural exchange reflected in this collection has been a long time in the making.’

Ottolinger

‘To look backwards is to die,’ began a short piece of text by Berlin-based writer and artist Calla Henkel, which accompanied Ottolinger’s S/S 2023 collection. Indeed, there was a distinct feeling of forward motion to Switzerland-born, Berlin-based Christa Bösch and Cosima Gadient’s latest offering, models trouncing down the runway at speed (some complete with wheeled suitcases, as if ready to walk straight on out of the door). Showing amid a sea of bare white mattresses – which doubled as the audience’s seats – Bösch and Gadient said they imagined those moments when you get out of bed and have a good feeling about the day ahead. Twisted leather jackets and folded skirts were created in the duo’s deconstructed style, while skin-bearing silhouettes – skimpy knit bra tops, sheer printed vests, sporty riffs on swimwear – will no doubt satiate those already invested in their sexy, 1990s-inspired clothing (Bösch and Gadient have an ever-growing legion of fans, evidenced in the amount of Ottolinger clothing worn by the show’s attendees). ‘You are ready. You will not slow down,’ concluded Henkel. ‘You will never look back. It is an Ottolinger summer.’

Valentino

Last season, Pierpaolo Piccioli presented a study in pink, using one vivid shade across the collection’s various garments (such was the colour’s prominence, it came with its own Pantone shade, ‘Valentino Pink PP’). Here, the colour reappeared on the numerous VIP attendants at the show dressed by the house, making Piccioli’s about-turn on the runway itself more distinct. This season, he chose a more muted palette of beige and brown, designed to be evocative of skin tones, part of a collection that had renewed focus on the body. Adaptable body suits, pieces in stretch lycra and contouring knitwear were created to ‘liberate the form’, while the Valentino Toile Iconographe – a monogram for the house – enveloped the models’ bodies (from shoes to tights to gown, to make-up over the face). Flashes of colour demonstrated Piccioli’s unique eye – here, bold yellow, a rich Valentino red – while his usual impressive flourishes of craft, from sprays of delicate feathers to incredible work with sequins and crystal, added the requisite glamour synonymous with the house. 

Balenciaga

‘The mud show’ was the title of Demna’s latest presentation for Balenciaga, held on the outskirts of Paris. On arrival, the reason was clear – the showspace itself was a vast mud-filled pit, its trodden-down runway pitted with pools of water (the set was created by Spanish artist Santiago Sierra; the scent enhanced by longtime collaborator Sissel Tolaas). In a letter, the Georgian designer – known for his transporting runway shows – noted that it was a metaphor ‘for digging for the truth and being down to earth’. ‘I hate boxes and I hate labels and I hate being labelled,’ he wrote. ‘Fashion loves boxes and labels… individualism in fashion is downgraded to pseudotrends dictated in a post in some stories of some celebrity of the moment… I’ve decided to no longer explain my collections and verbalise my designs, but to express a state of mind… you either like it or not.’ 

The statement set the stage for a defiant collection, which continued to mine a dystopian mood (last season, he talked about the experience of fleeing the Abkhaz-Georgian war as a 12-year-old; models dragged their belongings through an Arctic tundra, doubling as a comment on impending climate crisis). Demna elucidated that this collection was about individualism: ‘The more you try to be yourself, the more you get punched in your face,’ he said (indeed, models appeared bashed and bruised, lips split open). Clothes and bags were purposely soiled – backstage, he said that these items took longer to create than if he had tried to make them perfect – riffs on the various items which have become his hallmarks at Balenciaga (the uniforms of security officers, torn denim jeans, hoodies, oversized leather jackets). Models walked with lifelike baby dolls strapped to their chests, or carried crumpled crisp packets and bedraggled cuddle toys. The final looks had a dark glamour: twisting dresses that knotted onto the body, a sequin gown, hem dragging in the mud. 

Beneath the darkness, optimism lurked: ‘Every day becomes a battlefield to defend [your] unique identity… but how great it is it be different from one and other,’ he said. ‘Let us let everyone be anyone and make love not war.’

Saturday 1 October

Akris

A 2011 work by Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone provided the backdrop for Akris’ S/S 2023 show, which also marked 100 years of the label. Reading ‘We Are Poems’ in a rainbow-coloured font – for the finale, a series of dresses would echo the colours of the sculpture – it hovered over the Palais de Tokyo’s central fountain, guests looking out towards the Eiffel Tower beyond. It was a fittingly impactful setting for the Swiss house’s centenary celebration, seeing current creative director Albert Kriemler select nine pieces from the house’s archive from the years 1978-1992 to walk among the new collection. He had discovered them while preparing to shoot them for an upcoming book on Akris’ history; struck by the unexpected modernity of the pieces he ‘knew right away we had to work with them’. As such, the opening look was a double-face cashmere coat with tie fastening first created in 1978; a 1989 Vicuna blouse and 1983 nappa leather trouser followed. ‘Some designs defy time,’ said the collection notes of the styles. Kriemler’s own work has an equally timeless quality, this season providing a comprehensive wardrobe in his precise, minimally embellished style – from simple overcoats and easy tailoring to lightweight shirt dresses, some edged with lace (a motif drawn from archive pieces from the 1980s). ‘Let’s call it a rebeginning, an incentive to pause, a point in which everything can reappear or renew itself,’ he said in a letter left on each seat. ‘A collection where past, present, and future co-exist. A look back to move forward into a new century.’

Hermès

Nadège Vanhee-Cybulski imagined her woman for S/S 2023 at a ‘rave in the desert’ – ‘the sounds sound radiating from behind the hill follows the drift of the dawn: she’s never felt anything so beautiful’, read the collection notes. Indeed, the vast carpeted show space was evocative of a desert landscape; in its centre, a recreation of a sand dune, which as the show began was projected with an ebb and flow of swirling colours (‘the colours from the landscape came alive and began to move, to shimmer as though liquefied’). It led to a collection loosely inspired by outdoor adventures – Vanhee-Cybulski said she imagined ‘[a] return to a life in the heart of nature’ – with pieces nodding to tents, mosquito nets and hammocks, these functional items reimagined in the designer’s typically seductive style. A raincoat, for example, rolled up at the back to reveal a breathable mesh underlay – recalling the construction of a tent doorway – while utilitarian details, from toggle fastenings to zip-away openings, added a sense of ease to the otherwise luxurious pieces. A rich, desert-inspired palette – yellow, ochre, sand beige, brown, red and ‘dawn pink’ – completed this evocative, transporting collection. 

Ester Manas

Ester Manas’ S/S 2023 collection was titled ’Sunset Body’, attempting to capture the languid feeling of a summertime evening – the moment where the ‘undressed day turns into an otherwise dressed evening’. Founders Ester Manas and Balthazar Delepierre are known for their ‘one size fits all’ approach, where sizes span 34-50 (or S to 3XL), often in a singular garment through clever design tricks (a system of adjustable straps, for example). Beyond that, their collections are infused with a feeling of sensuality – ‘it’s for someone fierce, strong, sexy, a woman who really wants to be seen,’ Manas told Wallpaper* earlier this year – here emerging in a sun-kissed exploration of the ‘pleasure’ of salt, sea, sand and sun (‘the collection is only about pleasure’, read the notes). Arriving in a vivid palette of pink, orange, blue, lavender and iridescent black (‘like a promising night’) the various pieces saw body-tracing, swimwear-inspired silhouettes meet feminine flourishes – frills and ruffles, the shine of knitted lurex – and flashes of skin. ‘All its variations embrace the idea of a comfort that does not permit itself to be sexy,’ the pair say, the final looks giving a brief glimpse of an upcoming collaboration with Danish fashion label Ganni. ‘Everyone is welcome.’

Andreas Kronthaler for Vivienne Westwood 

‘This collection is my dream,’ said Andreas Kronthaler prior to his S/S 2023 collection, which looked towards the English metaphysical poet John Donne for inspiration. He had recently read Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne by Katherine Russell; in the collection notes, he quoted a passage from the book on clothing (a particular fascination for the poet, who was part of the court of James I). ‘John Donne understood that when we get dressed we ask something of the world. All clothes speak: they say desire me, or oh ignore me, or endow my words with greater seriousness than you would were I not wearing this hat.’ It lent the collection a theatrical, Rennaissance flair – the show saw models climb onto a wooden stage in the round – from doublet jackets, bodices and puffed bishop sleeves to swathes of silk jacquard decorated with silk stars (specially commissioned from Stephen Walters, ‘perhaps the only silk weaver left in England’). Towering platforms shoes, corseted gowns, and men’s underwear Kronthaler has owned since the 1980s completed the eclectic look which – besides the aforementioned jacquards – was crafted entirely from deadstock fabrics. ‘I always like to combine new with old,’ said the designer. ‘To get dressed is to make both a statement and a demand.’ 

Friday 30 September

Coperni

If you have an Instagram account, it is likely that you will have already witnessed Coperni’s thrilling closing act: a nearly nude Bella Hadid being sprayed with Fabrican, a liquid that when hardened creates a wearable textile (such is the speed of this transformation, Hadid was able to walk in the runway in the minimal slip dress just moments after its completion). ‘An experience that sublimates the female body in the purest and most innovative way, tempting to immortalise it,’ described the collection notes, which also saw the designers Sébastien Meyer and Arnaud Vaillant pay ode to ‘women of this world’ in all their multiplicities (‘to you, women in every city, every desert, every club who magnify space and oxygen, yet fill emptiness and shadows’). Indeed, the collection which preceded the viral finale had a fierce femininity; presented against a grinding techno soundtrack, silhouettes were sliced, tailoring pin sharp, heels Perspex. A run of hologram dresses and shirts were sculpted to the body; more delicate touches of lace emerged from skin-tight slips. The final flourish was a €100,000 version of their signature Swipe bag in solid gold – the second viral moment of the night. 

Victoria Beckham

The cloisters of Val-de-Grâce church provided the setting for Victoria Beckham's debut at Paris Fashion Week. Having previously shown in New York and London, Beckham called this latest move a ‘recontextualisation’ of the established ‘hallmarks and codes’ of the label – though in many ways it felt like a departure, with Beckham embracing a more vivid expression of sensuality (or, as the collection notes put it, ‘an embracing of feminity’). There were sheer, lingerie-inspired dresses with flourishes of lace; sinuous, contouring knits; latex leggings and body suits that peeked out below skirts or above the line of a waistband. A series of sharp, tailored pieces drew the link to Beckham’s past collections – here, the outline of a lapel appeared embossed. A duo of dresses with heart motifs – crafted from twists of silk jersey – nodded towards the city's romantic mood, a feeling continued in the celebration post-show, where hundreds of candles lit the historic courtyard outside.

Issey Miyake

‘We see design as a process driven by curiosity, built upon a comprehensive exploration – bringing joy, wonder, and hope to life, and of course with a touch of playfulness,’ read a short message from Issey Miyake creative director Satoshi Kondo prior to his emotive S/S 2023 show, an ode to the brand’s namesake, who died earlier this year (preceding the show, the Japanese designer’s portrait was projected onto the show space’s walls). ‘A form that breathes’ was the collection’s title, its sculptural forms – ‘kneading, carving, and shaping,’ Kondo described of the process – reminiscent of Miyake’s own extraordinary command of body and silhouette, and how they intertwine. The collection began with what Kondo called ‘Torso’, comprising sculpted drapes in relatively sombre shades of black and white, before moving towards a more expansive colour palette, itself a hallmark of the label. As ever, innovative processes created pieces with an almost otherworldly quality – bouncy ripples of pleats, made from recycled polyester; innovative knits, which emerged from the body like spikes – appearing best in movement (a group of contemporary dancers, who closed the show, demonstrated the various garments flexibility). ‘A form imbued with life, robust and lively,’ said the accompanying notes. ‘Not defined, not confined, enveloping the body, liberating the mind. 

Loewe

The invitation for Jonathan Anderson’s latest Loewe show was a single anthurium flower, its glossy red flower encased in a slim white box – ‘a product of nature that looks like an object of design, and treated as such,’ the designer said of its appeal. At the show venue, an enormous fibreglass recreation of a flower towered over the runway; on the opening looks, flowers were replicated once again – bright white, lime green, classic red – in various sizes, becoming hard corsages on dresses or sprouting from shoes (another pair was placed on the chest of a white gown, stamens pointing outwards suggestively). At his men’s show earlier this year in June – a comment on the intersection of nature and technology – real grass sprouted from coats and sneakers; here, the organic became inorganic, cast from fibreglass. 

It was a continuation of Anderson’s recent fascination with the way we consume imagery; at both Loewe and his eponymous label, surreal elements are an attempt to consider the way that technology shifts our perception of the world – ‘are we falling into our screens, becoming our phones?’ he said in London last month after his S/S 2023 JW Anderson collection. Here, he talked about ‘sharpening, stripping down, thinking forward… a focus on line, colour, shape: the reality of clothing, in tension, with precision.’ It meant an exploration of silhouette: polo knit skater dresses were shrunken, shirts blown up. One hoodie had a geometric edge; from the front, it appeared pixelated, as if being viewed on a screen. Hard breastplates – decorated with dainty flowers – sat just away from the body, skewing the shape. Panniers jutted from models’ hips.

‘I kind of liked this idea of something meditative,’ said Anderson, noting that the repetition of looks was part of the collection’s ‘trickery’. You don't know if it's the look that you saw, or the same person or not; It’s more focused. I feel like I'm starting to enjoy just the making of a silhouette.’ 

Thursday 29 September

Rick Owens

Rick Owens once again used the vast forecourt of Paris’ Palais de Tokyo – this time, its central fountain shooting a monumental spire of water high into the air – to backdrop a collection inspired by the figures of ancient Egypt, and biblical epics he would watch as a child (the inspiration points were similar to his men’s show this past June, when he said of Egypt, ‘I found great comfort in the remoteness and scale of its history’). A feeling of ritual and ceremony permeated the collection: silhouettes were draped around the body (the opening look felt like a play on the mantled statues of classical antiquity), shoulders were peaked, the shape of a jacket evoked the shell of a scarab beetle (a creature ancient Egypt saw as symbolic of eternal life). A black hooded clock was monastic in proportion, while a final flourish of tulle – Rick Owens’ take on the ballgown – provided a dramatic closer.  Most striking, though, was one of the collection’s fabrications – an otherworldly ‘gelatinous’ leather that had been treated with glycerin to appear sheer. 

Chloé

Gabriela Hearst looked towards an unexpected inspiration for her S/S 2023 collection for Chloé – nuclear fusion energy, which the designer called ‘a large-scale, peaceful, clean energy source’ (environmental concerns are at the heart of Hearst’s approach to design, both here and at her eponymous label; here, she had undertaken research into the technology with ITER, Commonwealth Fusion Systems and Helion). Taking place in the darkened Pavillon Vendôme, Hearst looked in particular towards the vast metal tokamak – a powerful magnetic device being developed to produce controlled thermonuclear fusion power – evoking its circular structure in the collection’s curved, industrial lines and metal embellishments, while a flashing laser light installation by artist Paolo Montiel-Coppa ‘resembled the magnet placement in a tokamak’ (it also lent the space the feeling of nightclub, or rave). ‘I was surprised how many people didn’t know about fusion – the clear opportunity we have with this collection to tell the positive story and cross-pollinate audiences,’ said Hearst. ‘It is extremely rewarding to use creativity to visually express what we learnt.’

Wednesday 28 September

Acne Studios

Acne Studios’ S/S 2023 collection marked ten years since the Stockholm-based label began showing its collections in Paris. To celebrate, Jonny Johansson imagined a ‘twisted wedding party’, a mood reflected in the all-pink set, which came complete with rumpled satin sheets and shell-adorned candelabras by nail artist Sylvie Macmillan. ‘I wanted to put a spin on the classic, kitschy wedding, referencing everything from the tablecloth to the chandelier, the wedding-night bed sheets, the bride’s shoe, the bows, and the cute flowers,’ said Johansson of the collection itself, which riffed on the archetypes of wedding nuptials in the label’s eclectic, undone style. Delicate layers of lace, transparent tulle adorned with flowers, and girlish bows and hearts set a romantic mood, while spikey accessories, battered leather, and the brand’s signature denim provided a tougher counterpoint. ‘I find weddings fascinating because they are always a melting pot, and they kickstart a lot of aesthetic choices,’ Johansson continued. ‘There’s something cute, kitschy, sweet about weddings – but also something serious, tense, and vulnerable.’

The Row

Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen continue to bring their distinct brand of ascetic luxury to Paris Fashion Week, presenting a typically restrained – but entirely desirable – collection for S/S 2023. There was, of course, plenty of brilliant outerwear – broad-shouldered coats with hems almost touching the floor; a trench, grasped over the chest with the hand – while a feeling of sensuality came from the silhouette, subtly nipped at the waist and flaring slightly towards the hips, or diaphanous layers which wrapped around the body. A passage of looks saw the designers forge new ground in an exploration of the intimacy and imperfections of handcraft, from a homespun crochet dress and top – the various knitted patterns lending them a feeling of collage – to swathes of delicate netting, intricately stitched with hundreds of shimmering crystals.

Paul Smith

‘A suit used to equal a job interview or a formal occasion, but now the suit is cool again,’ Paul Smith said at his S/S 2023 menswear show earlier this year, a thematic thread which continues into the designer’s latest womenswear collection. Contemporary riffs on tailoring provide the collection’s nexus – a sleeveless blazer, with an angular closure is worn with tailored shorts, while a play on the three-piece suit comes in matching satin shirt, overlaid bustier and trouser (Smith calls it a more ‘youthful’ take on the formalwear staple). Elsewhere, an after-hours mood permeates the collection – Smith says he drew particular inspiration from his musical icons of the 1970s and 80s – in louche silhouettes and tuxedo-inspired elements, which ‘blur the lines between day-to-night’. Despite this, the collection retains a resolutely relaxed mood, with gently ruched dresses, oversized trench coats, and soft-to-the-skin boucle, jersey and satin epitomising Smith’s uncomplicated, easygoing approach. 

Courrèges

‘Elapsed time, looking forwards, glancing backwards,’ were the evocative starting points of Nicolas Di Felice’s latest collection for Courrèges, symbolised by a stream of sand which poured from the ceiling onto the circular runway below – as if attendees were suspended in a giant hourglass (the spectacle was created by French artist Theo Mercier; the sand was made from nut shells ‘obtained from 100% renewable raw material’). He did so by looking towards the ocean (‘time leads back to nature’), the annular sand-covered runway also evocative of a beach – ruffled-haired models held their shoes in hand, as if wandering home the morning after (rave culture has been a prescient inspiration for Di Felice during his tenure at the house so far). It lent the collection a certain fluidity, which referenced both Di Felice’s sleek minimalism and the futurist innovations of the house founder. A series of flou dresses, for example, took their body-skimming line from a 1974 zippered dress, while a wetsuit created in 1981 ‘evolved’ into a leather jacket. Metallic halter swimsuits, spiky silicone dresses – their unique texture evocative of coral – and scuba fabrics completed the beach-side look, which was both recognisable and unexpected at once. ‘To look at the past as we look to the idea of the future,’ he said. ‘As a way to create for the now.’

Tuesday 27 September

Saint Laurent

‘Radical fluidity’ described Anthony Vaccarello of his glamourous S/S 2023 outing at Saint Laurent, reimagining the enveloping sheath dresses worn by American choreographer Martha Graham – which traced the line of the body and often stretched from head to toe – as diaphanous hooded eveningwear, which also recalled Yves Saint Laurent’s ‘capuche’ dresses of the 1980s. Indeed, the era proved to be something of a theme of the collection, not least in a brilliant array of power-shouldered outerwear – from elongated leather trenches to elegant floor-length wool coats – drawn from the archive and yet contemporary in their boldness of shape (such cinematic silhouettes have been a focus of Vacarello in recent seasons). Set against the usual backdrop of the Eiffel Tower, it was a blockbuster show which closed Paris Fashion Week’s first full day in electric manner.

Dior

Florentine noblewoman Catherine de Medici has become one of European history’s most evocative figures, bringing the riches of her realm – the Republic of Florence, prior to Italy’s unification – to 16th-century France and its royal court through her marriage to King Henry II. Among them, delicate Burano lace, the corset, and platform heels, her imports reshaping Parisian fashion and arguably defining feminine dress for centuries to come. The seductive appeal of De Medici provided the starting point of Maria Grazia Chiuri’s S/S 2023 collection for Dior, which explored women’s ability to exercise power through fashion. ‘The power of fashion becomes the art of woman,’ read the collection’s notes. ‘An art of invention, able to redefine the city of Paris over and over again, each and every time.’

Presented amid a rich Baroque-inspired cardboard ‘cave’ created by French artist Eva Jospin, Chiuri conjured De Medici’s spirit through a 21st-century lens – from swathes of intricate lace to panniers, corsets, and rich, ceremonial silhouettes (billowing sleeves, elbow-length gloves, symbolic embroidery). Contemporary elements were woven through the primarily black collection (De Medici wore only black after the death of her husband; Chiuri noted it was a colour with particular visual power) from toggle fastenings to denim, alongside cargo pants, bomber jackets, and trench coats. ‘Fashion dialogues with reality through artifice; the garments of the Court are transformed.’

There was, of course, an autobiographical thread that wove through the collection – Grazia Chiuri herself is an Italian in Paris; she too is attempting to make her mark on the way people dress in both the city and the world beyond. Time will tell Chiuri’s own influence, though the success of her tenure so far – Dior’s revenues are estimated to have tripled in her time on the job, bringing in close to $7 billion dollar profit – shows she is striking a chord with women with collections that, like De Medici’s wardrobe half a millennium before, encompass both power and desire. 

Stay tuned for more Wallpaper* coverage from Paris Fashion Week S/S 2023

Maria Grazia Chiuri’s tenure as creative director of Dior has shown her to be an avid student of the house archive – and, indeed, of Christian Dior himself, whose fixations and obsessions have been refracted through the Italian designer’s contemporary, and distinctly feminist, lens. 

For her A/W 2022 collection, Chiuri melded riffs on the historic silhouettes synonymous with the house – a version of Christian Dior’s 1947 ‘Bar Jacket’ was turned inside out, its padding exposed, for example – with a vividly futuristic sensibility. Garments were installed with illuminated tubes of wires, or overlaid with technical corsetry and gilets created in collaboration with Italian start-up D-Air Lab, the Dynamic Autonomy and Intelligent Robotics Lab (such innovations included air-bag technology and temperature-controlling elements). Dior described the collection as ‘suspended’ between past, present and future. 

Past, present, future: ‘62-22’ shoes by Dior

Such juxtapositions extended to the footwear, which saw Chiuri look towards the ornate footwear that Roger Vivier designed for the house in the early 1960s (in an early act of fashion collaboration, Vivier worked with Christian Dior for close to a decade, meeting the designer in 1953). The particular pair that Chiuri referenced to create the just-released ‘62-22’ shoe – its name a reference to the original shoe’s year of creation, 1962 – is notable for its intricate stitching and curved ‘comma’ heel (‘The innovative heel treatment adds tension and even a feeling of incredulity to his designs,’ says the Met Museum’s Costume Institute of a similar 1961 pair in its collection).

Here, the midcentury elegance of the original design is given a distinctive update with an overlaid strap in technical ultralight neoprene, which wraps around the ankle and is secured with anti-slip fastening inspired by D-Air Lab’s research. Fluorescent yellow stitching, the house says, is inspired by ‘the world of motorcycling’. Together with the various traditional embroidery – from mimosa flowers to a coral motif and sewn-on blue stones – the ‘62-22’ is an ode to Parisian savoir-faire, traditional and futuristic at once. 

Watch how Dior’s 62-22 shoes are made in the short film by Mélinda Triana below.

INFORMATION

dior.com

Fashion fans, mark your cultural calendars. Here, we present the greatest sartorially led museum shows in New York City, from roving designer retrospectives to themed extravaganzas. Check out these NYC fashion exhibitions for a combined culture and fashion hit.

NYC fashion exhibitions

Exhibition: ‘In America: An Anthology of Fashion’
Location: The Met
Dates: Part Two, May 7, 2022 – September 5, 2022

‘In America: An Anthology of Fashion’, the second of a two-part show on American fashion presented at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, opens this Saturday (7 May 2022). It follows the ongoing first chapter of the exhibition – ‘In America: A Lexicon of Fashion’ – which opened in September of last year. 

While ‘Lexicon’ is concerned with the energy and creativity of American fashion, from 1940s to present day, ‘Anthology’ casts its reach back further, to a time when technology, manufacturing and wealth were accelerating at pace (themes which feel prescient to our own current moment). Housed across 13 rooms in The Met’s American Wing, the show spans the late 18th century to the late 20th century, providing a major survey of American fashion and its role in political, public and domestic settings. In each of the museum’s ‘period’ rooms – vignettes designed to evoke specific moments in American history – viewers will find a range of pieces from brands still in operation (Oscar de la Renta, Brooks Brothers) to greats of their era (Charles James, Claire McCardell), as well as lesser-known designers who nonetheless have been critical in shaping American fashion.
 
Curator Andrew Bolton commissioned nine film directors – Sofia Coppola, Radha Blank, Janicza Bravo, Autumn de Wilde, Julie Dash, Tom Ford, Regina King, Martin Scorsese, and Chloé Zhao – to help create each of the exhibition’s ‘freeze-frame’ vignettes, setting the scene for the clothing displayed. One such example by Ford (a co-chair of this year’s Met Gala) depicts the 1973 ‘Battle of Versailles’, a charity fundraiser that saw five French designers (Marc Bohan for Christian Dior, Pierre Cardin, Hubert de Givenchy, Yves Saint Laurent, Emanuel Ungaro) pitted against five Americans (Bill Blass, Stephen Burrows, Halston, Anne Klein, Oscar de la Renta) in a set-to of style. The consensus proclaimed, somewhat unexpectedly, that the Americans were victorious.
 
While bustles and resplendent decoration are in no short supply – the coinciding Met Gala theme was ‘Gilded Age’, focusing on decadent late 19th-century style – some pieces look astonishingly relevant even today, such as Ann Lowe’s languid white silk evening gown (1941) or an asymmetric black cocktail dress by Charles James (1947). Similarly, there are highlights from designers who were instrumental in shaping American sportswear, whether Bonnie Cashin’s colourful playsuits (1946) or Vera Maxwell’s grey-flannel jumpsuit (1942). Writer: Tilly Macalister-Smith

Exhibition: ‘In America: A Lexicon of Fashion’
Location: The Met
Dates: Part One, 18 September 2021 – 5 September 2022

The first of a two-part, year-long extravaganza, ‘In America: A Lexicon of Fashion’ features a display of 100 garments dating from 1940 to the present day, set in an installation design inspired by a patchwork quilt. Referencing an 1856 quilt in the museum’s American Wing created by Adeline Harris Sears, featuring white silk diamond-shaped squares signed by some of the most famous Americans of the period, the exhibition is composed of white-scrimmed cases – a three-dimensional patchwork quilt – each containing a specimen of American fashion history.

Organized into 12 sections that seek to define the emotional qualities in American fashion, such as Nostalgia, Belonging, Joy and Strength, each exhibit is accompanied by a headpiece designed by Stephen Jones featuring a word summing up a corresponding sentiment, thus forming a comprehensive visual dictionary. Most notably, the showcase features a wide range of designers, both past and present, of different ages, backgrounds, cultures and genders, that captures just how colourful American culture is. Writer: Pei Ru-Keh

Exhibition: ‘Christian Dior: Designer of Dreams’
Location: Brooklyn Museum
Dates: 10 September 2021 – 20 February 2022

When Christian Dior arrived in America for the first time in 1947, after debuting his controversial ‘New Look', his tour of the country was met with some resistance by those in shock at his proposed silhouette. Now the entire history of the Parisian label has come to New York's Brooklyn Museum, with the American iteration of ‘Christian Dior: Designer of Dreams', a blockbuster show that was ran at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, before moving onto the V&A in London.

The show dives into the design history and language not just of Monsieur Dior, but of the creative directors that succeeded him: Yves Saint Laurent, Marc Bohan, Gianfranco Ferré, John Galliano, Raf Simons, and Maria Grazia Chiuri. Curated by Florence Müller, Avenir Foundation curator of textile art and fashion at Denver Art Museum, in collaboration with Matthew Yokobosky, senior curator of fashion and material culture at Brooklyn Museum, the exhibition also places focus on the maison's relationship with America, and sees the location's central atrium of the Beaux-Arts Court redesigned as an enchanted garden.

Exhibition: ‘Ravishing: The Rose in Fashion’
Location: Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology
Dates: 6 August – 28 November 2021

A blooming lovely way to mark the reopening of the Fashion Institute of Technology, which has been shuttered since the Covid-19 pandemic began? A fashion exhibition dedicated to the diverse symbolism of the rose in fashion. It’s a flower denoting a host of emotions and spiritual connotations, including suffering, purity, and transience, that is referred to frequently by designers, ranging from Christian Dior to Schiaparelli, Halston to Noir Kei Ninomiya. 

‘Ravishing: The Rose in Fashion’, features 130 items, including hand-woven and embroidered 18th-century silks, a large collection of rose-swathed rare hats, and garments by Comme des Garçons, Charles James and Gucci, and explores the symbolism of roses in various colours, such as red, pink and black. The introduction to the show includes more than 75 original photographic portraits of people wearing roses, both real and artificial, dating from the 1850s to the 1920s, when the flower was used as a regular, transformative prop. 

Exhibition: ‘Sarah Moon: At the still point’
Location: Fotografiska New York
Dates: 14 October 2021 – 6 Feb 2022

Octogenarian French photographer and filmmaker Sarah Moon shows 30 years of work at Fotografiska New York – spanning fashion and fantasy, mystery and the macabre. Comprising photographs as well as films and books produced over the last 30 years, the exhibition showcases both Moon’s literary approach to working and her ability create dreamlike visuals, regardless of their destination and medium. ‘Sarah Moon creates her own timeless, unique visual language,’ says Amanda Hajjar, director of exhibitions at Fotografiska New York. ‘She expands outside straight fashion photography to something more conceptual, but we’re still able to recognize it as fashion focused. This unexpectedness keeps us interested and surprised.’ Writer: Pei-Ru Keh.

Physical fashion shows were back with a bang across New York, London, Milan and Paris. Here, we present the best runway sets and venues that stole the show for S/S 2022, from Saint Laurent's womenswear spectacular under the sparkling lights of the Eiffel Tower, to Prada’s cross-continent and time-zone spanning set up. 

Best runway sets, S/S 2022 womenswear

Dior

Adding to the roster of female artists she collaborates with, womenswear artistic director Maria Grazia Chiuri teamed up with octogenarian Italian artist Anna Paparatti on a board game-inspired show set. At the Jardin des Tuileries in Paris, a runway was formed from a circle of colourful flooring panels set at various levels, and a backdrop boasted artworks resembling dartboards and roulette wheels, recalling Paparatti's 1960s artworks, which alluded to the absurdities of life.

Givenchy

For his first physical runway show for Givenchy, Matthew M Williams took guests to the Paris La Défense Arena, the largest indoor performance venue in Europe, on the outskirts of the French capital, with a stark, art gallery-inspired show set. Here, Williams bathed his guests in the glow of a cinematic sun, by suspending a monumental oculus from the ceiling of the vast space.

Valentino

Celebrating the café culture of Paris, so enjoyed by many guests for the first time in 18 months, Valentino installed rows of wicker dining seating at its Carreau du Temple venue, alongside a vibrant flower stall. The Roman house's show also spilled inclusively onto the streets outside the expansive indoor location, where models strutted and posed in front of diners and drinkers, seated at the city's inviting bistros.

Prada

Talk about a time zone-spanning, continent-crossing runway show. As guests in Milan installed themselves into Prada's regular Deposito venue at the Fondazione Prada, a location lined with geometric blocks of seating, so another audience was getting comfy at Shanghai’s Bund One. The two shows began simultaneously, and were live-streamed onto screens at both locations, with guests taking in models, in physical or digital form, sporting satin dresses and slouchy leather outerwear that riffed on notions of sexy. (Read more about OMA/AMO and Prada’s 25 years of show sets.)

Saint Laurent

After show films set on sprawling sand dunes and icy glaciers, Saint Laurent returned to its signature Trocadéro location in Paris, illuminated by the twinkling lights of the Eiffel Tower. Here, models walked across a vast runway in lean and seductive silhouettes inspired by Paloma Picasso, lit up by an industrial wall of spotlights. At the show's finale, a waterfall flooded the catwalk, a stunning feat of nature slap bang in the middle of the city.

Moncler MONDOGENIUS

The label staged its latest Moncler Genius collections as part of an immersive phygital live-streamed event spanning five cities: Milan, Shanghai, Tokyo, Seoul and New York. In Milan, guests watched from a film studio location, as host Alicia Keys appeared IRL, interacting with Shanghai host Victoria Song via a huge screen, and presenting 11 collection films, which were showcased one by one. 

Loewe

Stripping back Loewe’s new show space at Paris’ La Garde Républicaine of ‘bits and bobs’, creative director Jonathan Anderson wanted his S/S 2022 Loewe venue to resemble a ‘blank piece of paper’. This concept allowed the silhouettes in the collection to take centre stage. Here, they entered the stark, pine-swathed show venue from a trapdoor in the ground, a twist on how the viewer usually takes in forms from the feet up.

Hermès

No one cemented the sense of escape served up on the S/S 2022 catwalks more than Hermès, which had a private plane land on the tarmac of its Le Bourget airport show location, an hour from Paris. Nadège Vanhee-Cybulski also worked with French artist Flora Moscovici, who created a series of 6m-high abstract panoramas, drenched in sunset tones, which moved as models navigated a circular show space, sporting easy but infinitely luxurious summer silhouettes.

Rejina Pyo

The London-based designer made a medal-worthy splash for her S/S 2022 womenswear show, transporting guests to the Zaha Hadid-designed London Aquatics Centre in Stratford. Here, the audience lined the Olympic venue's swimming pool and at the show's social media-flooded finale, members of the Team GB divers made dramatic twists and turns into the water below.

Miu Miu

For guests keen to get back to the boardroom, Miu Miu served up an office-inspired show set where swiveling Eames office chairs lined a snaking runway at regular show location Palais d'Iéna in Paris. The catwalk was neighboured by oculus-shaped screens, which featured two comedic films by Moroccan artist Meriem Bennani that were also debuted as part of the brand's accompanying live stream on social media. 

Jil Sander

In Milan, Jil Sander bathed guests in a monochromatic lilac haze, in an all-purple show set swathing circular stools, the walls and ceiling. The set design offered a tranquil, almost sophorific setting, for creative director's Lucie and Luke Meier to present a womenswear offering reveling in tactile fabrications, architectural volumes and bold patterns, from tiger print coats to fluid deck chair stripe dresses, crochet polo shirts to androgynous tailoring. 

Coperni

Coperni founders Sébastien Meyer and Arnaud Vaillant emphasized escapism for S/S 2022, which a collection that reveled in beach-ready silhouettes, suited for sun drenched shores in Ibiza or Greece. To amp up that out-of-office spirit, the brand swathed its runway with sand, lining the entrance to its catwalk space in Paris with 70,000 tall hemp trees, casting a heady scent around guests sat amongst the verdant shrubbery. 

‘Slowly something is mounting, some more desire and excitement,' Miuccia Prada said in her A/W 2021 post-show discussion with collaborator Raf Simons, and it's certainly true that there was an enthusiastic undercurrent running through many of the beauty looks in the A/W 2021 shows.

The season's helmet haircuts, body paint, face stickers, crayola colour palettes, goth extremism and other inventive takes on beauty, suggested a readiness to get playful, to experiment. Skincare and wellness dominated the conversation last year, but this season hints that there is ‘desire and excitement' around the return to a bolder makeup.

Below, we share some of the most memorable looks from the season to inspire your own cosmetic creativity.

Burberry 

One of the chief inspirations for Riccardo Tisci’s latest Burberry collection was the Arts and Crafts movement of early 19th century Britain, which saw artists like William Morris rebel against the rise of industrially produced goods in favour of handmade craft with wildlife motifs.
 
To translate this aesthetic into cosmetics, Burberry’s Global Beauty Director, Isamaya Ffrench, built on the hyper-minimalist makeup of last year’s show, maintaining the same high-polish skin and no-makeup makeup, but this time faces were scattered with delicate silver stars and face crystals. 

To complement the look, hair artist Jawara Wauchope created a series of military-style buzzcuts and gelled back styles so severe they looked almost as if they were painted on. 

Molly Goddard 

There’s always been a certain playfulness to Molly Goddard’s work, and that sensibility was complemented this season by Luke Hersheson’s whimsical hair, and colourful makeup by Miranda Joyce. Bundles of candy-floss hair were accompanied by crescent moons of neon-pink blush around the eyes and bright red lips.

The effect is like an artistic take on a child’s first experiments with their mother’s makeup cabinet. Hair blow-dried to the max and makeup applied freely and experimentally, without following any rules about where it should go. Its one of the many looks this season that suggests extravagant makeup and hair will be on-trend come autumn 2021.

Ahluwalia

The spraypainted prints of Priya Ahluwalia’s A/W 21 collection were reflected in the airbrushed steaks of colour that adorned models faces. London-based makeup artist Bari Khalique accented cheekbones, brow lines, and chins with strokes of iridescent blue for a painterly take on cosmetic colour application. 

Simone Rocha

Some of the most memorable hair looks of the season came courtesy of hairstylist Cyndia Harvey at Simone Rocha. Rocha was inspired the naivety of adolescence for this collection and Harvey’s long rows of plaits harked back to the uniform hairstyle of many school girls.

Yet, the formation of those braids into gravity-defining sculptures added an edginess to the delicacy, in a nod to Rocha’s signature blend of fragility and ferocity. That mixture was echoed in Lauren Parsons’ makeup, which features sweet, peachy lips and brown eyes that added a suggestion of sleepless nights. Ama Quashie nail art, featuring delicate flowers on a clear base, was a particularly delightful detail. 

Prada 

Within the first few seconds of Prada’s A/W 2021 digital show, the camera turns and follows the model through the OMA-designed set, showcasing her helmet of slicked-back hair. The extravagant minimalism of the look is the perfect foil for the exuberant textures, patterns, and colours that characterised Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons’ latest collection. While Pat McGrath's clean, barely perceptible makeup added an element of understatement. 

Salvatore Ferragamo 

The beginning of Paul Andrew’s A/W 2021 collection for Salvatore Ferragamo started off with beauty not all that different from the looks in many other shows this season – minimalist makeup paired with slicked-back hair. Yet, as the sci-fi inspired show film, continues shimmers of something different appears.

A model emerges from the white-lit tunnel, a nod to 2001: A Space Odyssey, with splotches of silver paint around her lips, the same appears again, until by the end of the show, models emerged almost entirely covered in silver body paint that complemented a matching silver trench or a revealing chainmail gown.

Yohji Yamamoto

Spooky is probably the best word for describing the hair and makeup in Yohji Yamamoto’s latest A/W 2021 collection. The show’s mixture of 19th-century structures and contemporary streetwear influence was reflected in beauty looks which walked the line between Romantic-era ghoul and modern-day punk.

Long black mains were crimped and flipped into Edward Scissorhands-style disarray, bouffant hair-dos are deflated and tinged with streaks of grey, shorter updos were styled into elaborate braids or gelled upwards and dyed blue, red, and black.

The gothy-punk hairstyles were accompanied by exaggeratedly pale skin and blanched lips for a corpse-like pallor.

Christian Dior

Maria Grazia Chiuri called her latest collection for Christian Dior ‘Disturbing Beauty' and it's true that there was a certain element of creepiness to the beauty looks Peter Philips and Guido Palau constructed for the show.

Philips' created a black smoky eye that was dark around the eye's corners and more lightly shaded across the crease for a withdrawn, eerie effect. Palau's hair emphasised the drama with a severe middle part or curtain of glossy bangs.

Dries Van Noten

It’s near impossible not to catch sight of the slightly smeared, vinyl lips in Dries Van Noten’s dance-filled A/W 2021 film. Ranging from rosy pink to brick red and deep berry, the punchy lips were emphasised by slicked back hair, minimal eye makeup, and the occasional bleached eyebrow.

Paired with free-flowing choreography and a Massive Attack soundtrack, the bold cosmetics of this collection offered some much-needed inspiration for the evenings of party makeup that, hopefully, aren’t too far away.

Just days before the opening of Paris Fashion Week, new Covid-19 restrictions were implemented in France. Bars and restaurants in Marseilles were shuttered. In Paris, drinking spots were ordered to close at 10pm and gatherings of more than 10 people were banned in public places. The final city to host the S/S 2021 shows with the most sizeable schedule has been beset with travel restrictions – from the 14 day quarantine required of returning UK citizens, put in place in mid-August – to the announcement that those arriving in Italy from France are subject to a Covid-19 test. But for the City of Lights, and the epicentre of the French fashion industry, estimated at creating one million jobs and €150 billion in direct sales each year, the shows had to go on, if at least in largely ‘phygital' form.

French fashion behemoths including Chanel, Dior and Louis Vuitton staged live physical shows, in venues including the top floors of former department store La Samaritaine, which has been shuttered since 2005, and the rooftop of the office skyscraper Tour Montparnasse, while brands including Balenciaga, Thom Browne and new-to-the schedule Wales Bonner devised innovative collection films, featuring in Browne's case, a trio of Olympic athletes. When a week before in Milan, Raf Simons and Miuccia Prada debuted their co-creative collection via a live stream, so Matthew Williams also presented his first collection for Givenchy online, teasing out his debut designs days before on Instagram.

Maria Grazia Chiuri may have presented a softer Dior silhouette for spring – inspired by enforced ease with which we are living our lives – but she didn’t go soft on the set design of the maison’s show, which was live streamed for the first time on TikTok. Inside a socially-distanced tent at the Jardin des Tuileries, Chiuri enlisted Italian visual artist and writer Lucia Marcucci, to create 7-meter high stain glass collages, that sprung up in 18 illuminated columns, inspired by the 2011 artwork ‘ Vetrata di poesia visiva’. Collage has a visual resonance with Chiuri, and she uses the art form as a tool to convey her feminist methodology. For the brand’s A/W 2018 show, she pasted the walls of the brand’s show space with provocative magazine covers and slogans, in a collection which nodded to the student protests in Paris in 1968.

If Dior is defined by the cinched in silhouette, Chiuri relaxed this rigour for spring. Models sported loose gauzy gowns, dressing gown shape jackets, easy tuxedo trousers and utilitarian cagoules. While her silhouettes were made for our at-home habits, details had an escapist élan, incorporating nomadic tie-dye, tassels, crochet and faraway florals. Designs for social-distancing, but still with a dream.

If anyone was going to respond to the practicalities of Covid-19 with technical tenacity it was Coperni. The label has its finger on the pulse of contemporary life, incorporating the digital experience into its design DNA. For S/S 2021, founders Sébastien Meyer and Arnaud Valliant developed ‘C+' a protective technical jersey developed using Swiss technology, which is lightweight, moisturising and anti-bacterial. This fabric – which is immersed in silver ions – was incorporated into streamlined designs, which worked to enhance the body, not restrict it, like elasticated trousers and loose buttonless shirts. The collection, shown on the roof of Paris’ tallest skyscraper, also featured wet suit leggings and technical blazers, with easy zip fastenings.  

Face masks and visors have entered the global accessory lexicon, and for his sophomore outing for Kenzo, creative director Felipe Oliveira Baptista tapped into this phenomenon. Inspired by an early 20th century photograph of a man wearing a structural 3D mosquito net and cap (complete with a hole for his pipe), he created silhouettes which spoke of soft protection. Models walking outdoors at the Institut National des Jeunes Sourds, wore mackintoshes and gauzy archival floral print cagoules, paired with beekeepers hats, some of which had transparent coverings protecting not only the face, but cocooning the entire body.

In 2020, the world accelerated in line with Marine Serre’s apocalyptic design vision, with proposes sustainable silhouettes for battling climate change, and environmental and social chaos. These mediate somewhere between sportswear and couture. In ‘Amor Fati', a film directed by Sacha Barbin and Ryan Doubiago, she presented a cinematically impressive sci-fi fantasy, with a circular narrative hooked around a laboratory, a natural landscape and an underground water-world. Serre’s cast sported balaclavas, Black Panther-centric berets and body suits, arming themselves against upheaval with recycled moire harnesses and holsters.

There’s also an apocalyptic armour behind Rick Owens’ designs. In recent seasons, the label’s creations have drawn on the garb of glam rock stars and mythological Aztec gods. For spring, Owens streamed a show from a piazza in front of Venice Lido’s casino – the spot where he spends his summers, and also the city where the term quarantine originated, when during the Black Death, infected ships arriving in the port where isolated for 40 days. An apt allusion to our times, the collection was titled ‘Phlegethon’, referring to one of the rivers in the Inferno described in Dante’s Divine Comedy. Owens equipped his hell dwellers in jackets with bulbous shoulders, fluid gowns, leather hot pants, platform thigh high boots and face masks. Uncharacteristically optimistic hues of creamy pink, banana yellow and candy apple red nodded to Neapolitan gelato. In his show notes Owens said, ‘I might just be getting into a taste for the lurid that an undercurrent of threat and dread can inspire.’ 

Pepto Bismol pink was also a colour favoured by Kiko Kostadinov’s Laura and Deanna Fanning, who for S/S 2021, evolved the label’s womenswear lexicon, experimenting with both Victorian and 1970s shapes, in bold hues and textures. Standout were hand craft-focused shirred and smocked dresses, which pucker and crinkle around the body, retro wide-collared tailoring, and an update of the brand’s curved Louis heel, embellished with colourful crystal beads and accentuated with Gladiator ankle straps.

Wales Bonner showed for the first time on the S/S 2021 schedule, but her collection – presented in ‘Thinkin Home', a sunset-drenched film by Jamaican artist Jeano Edwards – was the second in a three-collection spanning exploration of the diasporic connections between Britain and the Caribbean. While A/W 2020’s ‘Lovers Rock’ considered the British Jamaican community in the 1970s in London – inspired by Bonner’s father’s family, and photographs of teenagers hanging at Lewisham Youth Club, ‘Essence' explores the early 1980s origination of dancehall music in her grandfather's home country. Bonner looked to the style of Augustus Pablo, the Jamaican roots reggae and dub record producer and musician, and her collection sung of dancehall vibrancy and sleek British smartness, featuring stripe caftans mixed with tailoring, and fluid knitwear and bold patchwork corduroy. The collection also continued her collaboration with Adidas Originals, on slimline shell suits and colour blocked tees.

‘Psychedelic optimism’ is how Acne Studios’ Jonny Johansson summed up the brand’s S/S 2021 collection, designed to celebrate the possibilities of life experienced on pause. Looking to astrological elements as optimistic symbols, the Swedish brand collaborated with the LA-based artist Ben Quinn on a series of star prints layered over organza tunics. Johansson also honed in on luminescent fabrics, finding illumination in pearlised cotton, metallic threads and iridescent paper, and celebrating fluid and diaphonous silhouettes, with handcrafted details. Akris’ Albert Kriemler also found inspiration in phosphorescence, namely the light-emitting sculptures of Imi Knoebel. He collaborated with the German Minimalist on a series of fluorescent and vibrant creations that nodded to the artist’s graphic and colour-focused oeuvre, including caftans and relaxed dresses and chic tracksuits. ‘A Knoebel line, colour or form is instantly recognisable as its own. It represents what felt very right for this moment,' Kreimler explained. ‘Something designed today should not be obsolete tomorrow.'

There have been diverse opinions regarding the return to the physical show format, and one designer content with finding alternative methods is Jonathan Anderson. For the men’s shows back in July, he devised a ‘show-in-a-box' concept for his eponymous label, and for Spanish house Loewe where he is creative director, containing interactive runway show-inspired ephemera. At Loewe, the label's S/S 2021 men’s design was imagined as a grey canvas index card box – conceived in collaboration with M/M (Paris) – packed with fabric swatches, a record, and a pop-up show set, inspired by Duchamp's ‘Boîte-en-valise', a box the artist carried in a suitcase with miniature monographs of his own work.

For S/S 2021 womenswear, Anderson broke out of the boundaries of the box, creating a ‘Show-on-the-wall', an artist's portfolio featuring S/S 2021 looks, accompanied by an interactive selection of ephemera, encouraging its receiver to immerse themselves in the collection's elements, as the viewer would at a physical runway show. Eagerly Instagrammed add-ons included a roll of wallpaper designed by Anthea Hamilton, plus a border roll depicting spring's voluminous and architectural shapes – enhanced with plumes of taffeta, ruffles of broderie anglaise, glittering knots and XL pleats – sent with Loewe monogrammed scissors, a canvas tool bag, paintbrush and glue. 

Nadège Vanhee-Cybulski also placed focus on the printed form, sending out a collectors' item scrapbook to accompany Hermès’ physical show, with atmospheric images lensed by creatives including Wallpaper* collaborator Katrien De Blauwer. The maison’s accompanying collection was a masterclass in seductive minimalism. Body suits with cut-out backs were paired with knee length skirts in the supplest leather, crisp trousers styled with bandeaus, while shawl coats featured rolled up collars that unpoppered into scarves. The colour palette was rich and restrained in tones including caramel, sorbet yellow and scarlet. The most luxurious house shoe for spring? The Hermès clog, complete with an ‘H’ detail leather upper.

Paul Smith – whose beloved British brand celebrates its 50th anniversary this year – immersed himself in his personal history for spring. The designer – who swapped a physical or digital show for a lookbook and walk-through press appointments in London – was inspired by over 30 holiday photo albums, featuring snapshots of himself and wife Pauline. ‘We designed it over the phone!’ Smith laughed of the creative process behind the soothingly optimistic collection which features easy zip-up jackets in stripe tailoring fabrics, silk skirts and beach shorts emblazoned with enlarged archive rose prints, plus unconstructed tailoring. A double-breasted jacket with tactile prick stitch detailing, was inspired by the retro shapes Smith spotted on trips to Havana. ‘If people have been wearing sweats and tees all year, we ned to ease them back in,’ he said of the soft shapes.

There was also a nostalic nod behind Miu Miu's spring offering, which featured super sweet girlish silhouettes, like tracksuit tops paired with retro briefs, stripe halternecks and tennis skirts, knitted polo shirts and micro minis shimmering with plastic pailettes. It spoke of the innocent joy on dressing up and was sublime in its celebratory tone.

Designers used the downtime experienced during global lockdown to reconsider the core values of their brand. In fashion cities across the world, labels have presented pared-back or streamlined collections, with fewer looks and more focus. This concept resonated with designer Satoshi Kondo, who, troubled by the sheer number of shipment boxes used to transport Issey Miyake's last A/W 2020 offering from Tokyo to Paris, conceived a collection so compact it fitted into one. S/S 2021 features a number of shrink-inspired silhouettes that nod to the brand’s prowess in fabric development and innovation, from a technical parka and poncho which can be folded into a garment bag, to zig-zag knit patterned tops and dresses that can be rolled into a shape of a sponge. 

Y/Project’s Glenn Martens also presented a vision which evoked the ‘essential meaning’ of the experimental brand. Celebrating the versatility of its hybrid silhouettes, an accompanying ‘How to wear’ film showed how pieces could shaped, with the incorporation of zips and poppers. At Schiaparelli too, Daniel Rosenberry’s third collection for the house was focused on ‘essential silhouettes in the best fabrics’ that assimilated the hand-focused flourishes of haute couture, like trouser suits in the brand’s signature hot pink with Rorschach test-centric prints, Delphic gowns and chain-embellished shirting. These silhouettes were anything but shy, and were paired with hammered gold jewellery with nose and keylock details – surrealist symbols of the house.

While few were physically able to attend Paris for the spring shows, brands chose to celebrate the city itself. At Ami, the brand held its first show on the womenswear schedule, on the bank of the River Seine. In a more seductive spin than previous seasons, models sported dresses with cut-outs at the décolletage and check pencil skirts paired with string vests, inspired by Nineties evening wear. The urban landscape also inspired the soundtrack to Paco Rabanne’s pared-back physical show at Espace Commines, which bought a relaxed, daytime ease to the brand's disco-centric shapes. Nostalgic noises, that were silent for so much of this year, accompanied the collection, like dogs barking, police sirens honking, cars indicating and bike bells jingling.

The fashionable flaneur was also a focus. In a digital film presented as a music video, Balenciaga's S/S 2021 models stomped towards the Place Vendôme and along the Seine in the dark, miming to a synthy take on Corey Hart’s electro pop hit ‘Sunglasses at Night,’ sporting chainmail dresses and hybrid sportswear, fluffy heeled hotel slippers and wraparound shades, naturally. Rokh’s Rok Hwang was also fascinated with the concept of walking outside at night - a pastime we’ve all appreciated in recent months - recalling teenage wanders with friends when living in Austin Texas. The brand’s cinematic show film, set in an otherworldly location, featured modern flaneurs in fighting forms, including ruffled and tartan Victoriana dresses layered with leather harnesses.

For his debut at Givenchy, 1017 ALYX 9SM founder Matthew Williams teased out snippets of his S/S 2021 showcase a week before on Instagram, posting low-fi close-up images of chains and padlocks, lensed by Nick Knight. Hardware was essential to the designer’s vision, which was revealed in a surprisingly low key lookbook, with metal elements designed as a luxurious interpretation of the much-coveted logo. Williams looked at the codes of the historic couture house through a Gen Z-centric streetwear lens, featuring sleek, architectural shapes like square shouldered leather capes paired with gauzy bejewelled gowns, severe tailoring and tube dresses with seductive exposed backs. Williams nodded to previous creative directors, celebrating the tenure of Alexander McQueen with animalistic accessories, like sandals with curving horn heels and caps with knobbly antlers, and to Riccardo Tisci, in a hardware-focused revision of the graphic Antigona bag, beloved of supermodels in the Noughties. Referring to the collection as a ‘sampler’ of things to come, William’s Gen-Z fans will be fixated on what is next.

Chanel is one of many red carpet labels that has lost out to countless cancelled occasions this year, although Julia Garner and Shira Haas did opt to wear the brand to the Emmy’s first ever ‘phygital' awards show. With a typically insouciant mindset, creative director Virgine Viard was attracted to the off-duty attitude of an actress before a photocall for S/S 2021. In the show's press release she spoke of women with ‘their attitude a little out of sync with the outfits they’re wearing’ – a feeling many people have experienced this year, dressing up for visual dinner parties and on-screen events. Models walked against a huge Hollywood-inspired Chanel sign – the letters of the house erected with huge scaffolding – at a physical show inside the Grand Palais, sporting fluid asymmetric dresses, power shouldered skirt suits, sequin bermuda shorts and slogan t-shirts inspired by neon lights. The show celebrated cinematic escapism, one of which was rooted in reality.

Also intrigued by the codes of dressing today, John Galliano dissected the haute couture shapes and techniques used in Maison Margiela’s Artisanal collection, creating ethereal, finely crafted and avant-garde creations which were presented in ‘S.W.A.L.K 2', a Nick-Knight directed sequel to the brand’s video in July. The 40 minute film flits between fitting scenes in the label’s studio, and a sprawling estate in Tuscany, where Galliano’s models dance the tango, offering extensive insight into the creative process behind creating a collection.

Louis Vuitton's Nicolas Ghesquière was also fascinated by the concept of ‘in between garments' that reflect the on-pause lifestyle of today, somewhere between suiting and sportswear, at home clothes and ones for dreaming of going out. Usually showing in various areas of The Louvre, from its IM Pei-designed Cour Marly to its underground Pavillon de l’Horloge, the label decamped to the top floor of La Samaritane, the LVMH-owned department store which has been shuttered for refurbishment since 2005. In a physical and digital presentation blend, the Art Deco architecture and Art Nouveau frescoes were offset with green screen elements, which showed snippets of Wim Wenders ‘Wings of Desire' to audiences at home. Ghesquière's ‘stylistically vague' shapes featured 1980s power suiting, chainmail mini dresses and slouchy knitwear. Silhouettes appeared elegantly thrown on, like boardshorts paired with a long duster coat and a ‘Peace’ slogan tee. The show summed up a season that navigated the online and physical realms, creating clothing which caters to today's much changed lifestyle, one which shows no sign of settling come spring.

As the pace of our days has shifted, so we revert to simpler pleasures, and baking, keeping fit and indulging hobbies are imbued with a new significance. At home, Dior’s artistic director Victoire de Castellane’s thoughts, too, are firmly on the domestic, and in these series of sketches she imagines how she would have passed these surreal days with Christian Dior. The Rose des Vents sketches, like the jewellery collection of the same name, take inspiration from Dior’s favourite leitmotifs.

‘I wondered what Christian Dior and I would have done during this unprecedented period of confinement and of course over the Easter weekend,’ she muses. Her felt tip pen series concocts the ways they fill the days: ‘I imagined us doing exercise, cooking and of course going on an Easter egg hunt. Christian Dior was not a great sportsman so I pictured us exercising in the salon of 30 Avenue Montaigne, him remaining in a suit and tie. And since he was known for being a gourmet, just like myself, I saw us in the kitchen, baking cake.’

Christian Dior would no doubt have approved: ‘The materials used in the kitchen are just as noble as those in couture, and in my profession I like how the realisation of the work is associated with the involvement of the hands and mind,’ he once remarked.

INFORMATION

dior.com

‘For one thing, I love being in a country where the past lies so vividly around me’ explains Christian Dior in his autobiography, of his affection for England. It was a sentiment born from his first trip to the country in 1926, to hone his language skills before beginning military service. It’s wholly fitting, then, that the history of the couturier himself, and the nip-waisted heritage of the house of Dior, is the subject of a comprehensive exhibition at the V&A in London. 

The largest show ever staged in the United Kingdom dedicated to the Parisian maison, Christian Dior: Designer of Dreams is a reimagined take on the seminal Musée des Arts Décoratifs exhibition staged in Paris in 2017. It places particular focus on Monsieur Dior’s affection for Britain. Not only did the couturier favour Savile Row designed suits, ‘the days of Gainsborough’ and British gardens, he was a famous fashion favourite of Princess Margaret.

Dior established his maison in London in 1952, and staged a fashion show at the historic Blenheim Palace (at the behest of the Duchess of Marlborough to raise money for the Red Cross) in 1954. His youthful successor Yves Saint Laurent also held shows there in 1957 and 1958.

‘Dior in Britain’ is one section of what is an eleven-part exhibition, curated by Oriole Cullen, and designed by Nathalie Crinière. Others include ‘The Ateliers’ – a breathtaking monochromatic representation of the maison’s historic toiles, displayed inside floor-to-ceiling vitrines, and ‘Designers for Dior’ a history-spanning celebration of the key artistic directors since Christian Dior’s death in 1957.

Across a series of resplendent rooms, in the V&A’s recently opened Amanda Levete-designed galleries, vitrines, dioramas and resplendently-clad mannequins convey the history of the house, most renowned for its groundbreaking reinterpretation of the female form, when M. Dior introduced 1947’s Bar Jacket and its waist-accentuating ‘New Look’.

M. Dior was passionate about horticulture, an affection that began during childhood, when he admired the gardens surrounding his seaside home of Granville. The couturier had a particular passion for roses, and even helped erect a clifftop rose garden in his family’s grounds. We gravitated towards ‘The Garden’ section of the exhibition, which explores the importance of flora to Dior. This space features an impressive laser-cut and hand-assembled paper installation, created by Wanda Barcelona, featuring a new flower based on the Princess Margaret rose. Here, in an exclusive film you can see the installation bloom into life.

‘Each of my subsequent visits to Great Britain has given me the same sensation of happiness and personal liberty, which I experienced in the first visit’ M. Dior revealed in his memoir. This exhibition is sure to reveal similar sensations.

V&A “Christian Dior: Designer of Dreams’ installation view. Photography: Adrien Dirand 

INFORMATION

‘Christian Dior: Designer of Dreams’ is on view from 2 February until 14 July 2019. For more information, visist the V&A website; Dior website

ADDRESS

Cromwell Road 
London
SW7 2RL

VIEW GOOGLE MAPS

Mood board: There’s a sense of pirouetting pizzazz on the S/S 2019 catwalks. Gucci’s Michael Clark-choreographed performance at the Gucci Hub, Jil Sander’s boxing boots-meets-ballet shoe, Acne Studios’ ballet dancer photo patches and Merce Cunningham dance company poster prints. There’s strength, power and composure in modern dance, and it was these elements which Dior creative director Maria Grazia Chiuri drew upon for her S/S 2019 show.

Whether it’s a woman wearing a pro-feminism tee shirt or one channelling the rebellious spirit of the 1968 student riots in Paris, Chiuri is a powerful female proponent. She name checked Loie Fuller, Isadora Duncan, Ruth Saint Denis, Martha Graham and Pina Bausch as inspirations: pioneering dancers and choreographers who changed the face of on-stage storytelling, and her collection captured the femininity of ballet dancer silhouettes. In a collection of nudes, pinks midnight blue and shimmering metallics, Chiuri presented a collection of taffeta skirts and jersey crop tops, long gowns with their tops cut like leotards, draped dresses, footwear with delicate ribbon details which criss-crossed up leg and dancer’s head bands. The soft silhouettes were less restraining than the nipped Bar Jacket heritage of the house. There were also flourishes of tie-dye and acid wash denim, floral prints of sunflowers and kaleidoscopic tessellations of petals and chic short suits. The pretty beauty associated with arabesques and pliés, fused with a modern utility and a hippy flourish.

Team work: Chiuri deviated from the usual Musée Rodin setting of her womenswear show, instead sending guests to a hippodrome in the Bois de Boulogne. The cavernous and dimly lit showspace was illuminated with spotlights, and as the show began petals delicately floated to the ground. What followed was a spectacular dance performance, performed in parallel with Dior’s runway show, choreographed by Sharon Eyal. An avant-garde and eerie contortion of twisting and jerky limbs, with dancers sporting Dior leggings and bodysuits adorned with astrological signs. 

Best in show: Those more frothy ballerina-esque creations will give instant red-carpet appeal, and the millennial customer to which Chiuri is catering will fall for their soft romanticism. But there were more mature and classic shapes that will please the brand’s older customer, like a terrific navy column dress with voluminous sleeves, an inky trouser suit or a shapely white skirt with delicate floral embellishments. Like Sharon Eyal’s dancers on stage, they had a great sense of modern drama.

Scene setting: Last season, in a tribute to the sculptor Niki de Saint Phalle, Dior artistic director Maria Grazia Chiuri covered the walls of the maison’s showspace at the Musée Rodin with walls of glittering mosaic. Since taking the creative helm of the house in July 2016, the designer has made female empowerment her creative mission – take the brand’s ‘We Should All Be Feminists’ t-shirt of S/S 2017, or the masks in her recent S/S 2018 couture collection inspired by Peggy Guggenheim, a renowned advocate of female artists. For A/W 2018, Chiuri celebrated the left wing protests that shook the Left Bank in 1968, and the walls and floors of Dior’s show set were plastered with a colourful collage of protest posters, magazine covers and slogans including ‘I Am Woman’ and ‘Women’s Rights are Human Rights’.

Mood board: Women in France were not allowed to open a bank account or work without their husband’s permission until the 1960s, and during this decade emancipation was reflected in clothing like miniskirts, flat shoes and trouser suits. Marc Bohan, then artistic director of Dior, opened the ready-to-wear boutique Miss Dior after female protestors rallied outside the Dior boutique with placards emblazoned with ‘Mini Skirts Forever’ in 1966. This was a collection of youthful 60s-inspired protest-wear, featuring kilt skirt suits, reworked denim, bright hippy knitwear, ponchos, embroidered organza dresses and DIY patchwork pieces, made using archive Dior fabrics.

Finishing touches: Chiuri has capitalised on the brand’s accessory offering, and Dior’s logo print bags are front row fixtures. For A/W 2018, she dreamed up studded clogs and biker boots, rebellious balaclavas and baker boy hats. The reintroduction of leather and beaded saddle bags — a noughties signature — came with an ethnic embroidered strap. A must-have for the millennial that marvels at her take on female empowerment come autumn.

To say that knitwear is in designer Carolyn Yim’s blood would only account for some of the passion she brings to her womenswear label, Ply-Knits. Yim’s family are veterans in the knitwear manufacturing business. In addition to helping clients like Givenchy, Max Mara, Christian Dior and Ralph Lauren manufacture knitwear from their bases in Hong Kong and China today, Yim’s grandmother (and founder of the family business) most notably made an embroidered bias-cut pointelle gown for John Galliano and Dior Couture in the late ’90s.

For Ply-Knits, Yim combines both these facets of her family background to create quiet yet impactful pieces. Her poetic collections fuse technical expertise with a classic artistry, not only on the stylish surface, but on the textile level as well. Primarily made from deadstock yarn because of its superior quality, each Ply-Knits piece is designed for comfort, durability and wearability – characteristics that are all supported by the type of knit used.

For example, the label’s signature knit pant is made from a finely tuned merino wool and cashmere mix that possesses just the right tension to offer support and a sleek fit, while simultaneously being water repellent (thanks to the natural properties of wool) and armed with a sensual feel that wearers will be able to enjoy day after day.

‘We really work with the materials and make our own textiles each and every time,’ explains Yim of her detail-oriented manufacturing process, which often begins with an assessment of the vintage yarns and experimenting with different knitting and spinning techniques to create the right fabric. ‘We believe in the integrity of the textiles to hold the structure of every garment.’

Although Yim’s in-depth knowledge of knitwear sits at the heart of the label, Ply-Knits’ understated but detail-oriented aesthetic is just as alluring. With standout pieces including a herringbone-ribbed, mandarin scholar’s mock-neck top in techno cotton and a correspondent’s jacket in a merino wool and viscose mix that retains its polish despite long hours of travelling, Ply-Knits’ offerings easily fit into any well-appointed wardrobe.

Filled with invisible details, such as elastic thread or reinforced waistbands to support regular wear, along with unexpected knit patterns that bestow minimalist styles with a seductive impact, Ply-Knits redefines everyday luxury with its holistic design approach.

‘I think each garment should function as architecture and it should make the human body look good,’ Yim reflects. ‘I design intuitively, but am also influenced by industrial design principles. Dieter Rams’ “Ten Principles of Good Design” is something I always come back to.’

INFORMATION

For more information, visit the Ply-Knits website

Precision cuts and non-precious metals are the contemporary take on classic styles
‘Ca Cartonne’ cuff in coated aluminium, titanium and diamonds, by Suzanne Syz. ‘Aria Passionata’ brooch in gold, lacquer, rubies, garnets, diamonds and central 22.51ct rhodolite garnet, from the Chaumet est un Fête collection, by Chaumet. ‘Tiare’ earrings in blackened gold, diamonds and rubies, by Reza. ‘Soothing Lotus’ necklace in gold with rough and polished diamonds and central 6ct diamond drop, by De Beers. ‘Piccadilly’ fabric, £100 per m, by Nya Nordiska. Jewellery prices throughout, on request

Beading and lattice work add a sense of lightness to hard materials
Left, ‘High Jewellery’ necklace in white gold with turquoise, emeralds and diamonds, by De Grisogono High Jewellery. ‘Feather 0011’ fabric, £70 per m, by Kinnasand. Right, necklace in white gold with diamonds and central 19.79ct Ceylon sapphire, from the Resonances de Cartier collection, by Cartier. ‘Diamond River’ earrings in platinum with diamonds, by Harry Winston. Ring in white gold with diamonds and central 4.29ct fancy vivid yellow diamond, from the Swirl collection, by Graff. ‘Feather 0012’ fabric, £70 per m, by Kinnasand

Expert gold techniques add texture to create a beautifully contemporary finish
Left, ‘Blue Shore’ cuff watch in white gold with lapis lazuli dial, from the Sunlight Journey collection, by Piaget. ‘Sailor Tattoo’ cuff in white gold with diamonds, from the Flying Cloud collection, by Chanel Fine Jewellery. ‘Feuille’ brooch in white gold with diamonds, from the Hiver Imperial collection, by Boucheron. ‘Scratch 6787/0001’ fabric, £70 per m, by Kinnasand. ‘Kito CS’ fabric £250 per m, by Nya Nordiska. Right, ‘Cachette des Coccinelles’ clip in gold with diamonds, spinels and central 10.17ct Zambian emerald, from the Le Secret collection, by Van Cleef & Arpels. ‘Divissima’ bracelet in pink gold with diamonds, amethysts and rubellites, by Bulgari. ‘Feather 0010’ fabric, £70 per m, by Kinnasand. ‘Batumi Uni CS’ fabric, £59 per m, by Nya Nordiska

Metal and stones take on the guise of fine fabrics in intricate mesh and ribbon designs
Left, ‘Les Merveilles Meche’ necklace in white gold with diamonds, rubies, pink sapphires and central 10.06ct white diamond drop, by Boghossian. ‘Feather 0011’ fabric, £70 per m, by Kinnasand. Right, ‘Elixir of Youth’ brooch in titanium with diamonds, rubies, sapphires and central 42.39ct jadeite cabochon, by Anna Hu. ‘Bosquet de l’Encelade’ bracelet in gold with rock crystal, diamonds, emeralds, spinels, spessartite and tsavorite garnets, sapphires, Paraiba-type tourmalines, turquoise and central 12.38ct black opal, from the Dior à Versailles Côté Jardins collection, by Dior Haute Joaillerie. ‘Tesori del Mare’ bracelet in white gold and titanium with diamonds, sapphires, rubies, spinels, spessartite and tsavorite garnets, Paraiba tourmalines, and pearls, from the Mediterranea collection, by Giampiero Bodino. ‘Feather 0011’ fabric, £70 per m, by Kinnasand

Mood board: Why have there been no great women artists? This was the striking question posed by the art historian Linda Nochlin that welcomed us to the Dior show. As one French journalist duly noted, Camille Claudel, Louise Bourgeois, Frida Khalo and Georgia O’Keefe might have disagreed – but it certainly explained the show’s mood and inspiration. This season, Maria Grazia Chiuri was inspired by French-American sculptor Niki de St Phalle and her fellow female artists from the sixties. In a concrete setting of organic shapes and mirror mosaic decorations, the Italian designer presented her woman – part Niki, part Edie Sedgwick.

Best in show: Chiuri seems intent on making her ‘we all should be feminists’ message evolve, this time by opening the show with a striped t-shirt bearing Nochlin’s provocative statement. While the question about whether feminism can be reduced to a slogan still remains, the piece is sure to be a commercial success. As will the patchwork jeans, sequined mini and maxi dresses – a nod to the lesser-known Marc Bohan period at Dior – and especially the accessories. Chiuri’s flair for irresistible shoes really came through in this shows. Flat, lace-up, knee-high boots and Mary Janes (lovely in their patent leather version, even lovelier in mirrored mosaic) are sure to appeal to Millenial customers, which, since Chiuri’s appointment as art director, seem to be the core clientele of the French house.

Team work: Michel Gaubert’s soundtracks have for a long time been key to the success of Dior’s shows, and this time was no exception. Gaubert dug up as fine – and kitsch – a selection of 60s instrumental pieces as there ever was. Particularly inspired was his use of the score in William Klein’s 1966 cult film Qui êtes-vous, Polly Maggoo? (Who Are You, Polly Maggoo?). The ecclesiastic-inspired music worked as well with Anna Wintour gazing at Chiuri’s golden mosaic-dresses as it did with the maximalist fashion editrixes admiring the metal dresses in the movie. Only Gaubert could show that kind of humour.

Drawing together prized pieces from the collections of the Met, the V&A, the Musée des Arts Décoratifs and the Kyoto Costume Institute – not to mention the personal collections of Dior devotees like Hamish Bowles – comes the National Gallery of Victoria’s latest fashion exhibition in Melbourne.

‘The House of Dior: Seventy Years of Haute Couture’ is not the first exhibition to span the entire history of the brand from the esteemed designer’s debut in spring/summer 1947, through its subsequent directors Yves Saint Laurent, Marc Bohan, Gianfranco Ferré, John Galliano and Raf Simons, right up to today’s Maria Grazia Chiuri. It is however, the first to explore the extraordinary relationship between Australia and the storied house.

‘The House of Dior has a long and deep history with Australia that a lot of people may not know about,’ explains Katie Somerville, NGV’s Senior Curator of Fashion and Textiles. ‘Within a week of Dior’s dramatic New Look collection of February 1947, headlines celebrating his talent appeared in local Australian newspapers encouraging department stores to quickly add the house to their Paris itineraries.’

Department stores responded obediently and sales on the continent quickly soared. So much so that in 1948, when Christian Dior had become the biggest name in fashion, Sydney’s David Jones department store announced that it would host the first Dior collection to be seen outside of Paris. And so, on the the 31 July that year, David Jones presented ‘On Parade’, Christian Dior’s spring/summer 1948 Haute Couture collection, in its Elizabeth Street store.

To enormous fanfare, 12 models paraded a 50-strong collection of day, cocktail and evening looks, each embodying the new codes of femininity with which Dior had reinvigorated the industry after the Second World War. Many of these looks can be observed in the upcoming exhibition, from the nipped in tailcoat-like ‘Caprice’ dress (which sold particularly well in the country), to photographs taken that very day; one of Australian model June Dally-Watkins wearing the impressive lace and organdie gown, ‘Dolly’, being one of Somerville’s favourites. Pristine paraphernalia abounds too, from resplendent announcement posters to gilt invites and photographs of the beautifully packaged clothes themselves, disembarking from their lengthy migrations.

‘On Parade’ established M Dior on the world stage but it was only the beginning of his love affair with his Australian clientele. Before the show he’d explained to the Sydney Morning Herald’s European correspondent that his clothing was perfect for Australia. ‘Living in the sunshine of a comparatively new country, unscathed by war, Australians have a cleaner, brighter outlook and are more receptive to new ideas than the tired people of European countries,’ Dior said of Australia’s cosmopolite.

And he continued to champion his customers on the Southern Hemisphere: ‘Christian Dior couture garments titled “Australie” appeared in no less than six collections between 1947 and 1957,’ Somerville explains. ‘And ensembles called “Sydney”, “Melbourne”, “Canberra” and “Wattle” appeared in Dior’s final collection of 1957c (his second to show in Australia, the same year of his death).

As will be apparent when walking through the exhibition, each of Dior’s creative directors has reverentially pooled inspiration from the iconic house archive and as such, the legacy of his Australian fascination continues to influence to this day. 

INFORMATION

‘The House of Dior: Seventy Years of Haute Couture’ is on view until 7 November. For more information, visit the National Gallery of Victoria website

ADDRESS

National Gallery of Victoria
180 St Kilda Road
Melbourne

View Google Maps

This piece currently holds the Handmade record for taking the most time to create, and is unlikely to see it broken any time soon. When we originally approached designers Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec with an invitation to collaborate with legendary embroiderer Lesage Intérieurs for Handmade 2016, they gracefully declined. They argued that the standard four month timescale that we usually work to for Handmade projects was just not enough, bearing in mind not only their existing design commitments, but also the amount of time required to get to grips with the potential pitfalls of an unfamiliar craft.

But we’re not ones to take no for an answer, especially when we knew it would be such an exciting collaboration. So at last year’s Salone del Mobile, we persuaded them to meet with Lesage that June with the intention of working on a project for Handmade 2017. This would give them a clear ten months to complete the commission, a fortuitous move as the Bouroullecs’ piece would eventually take around 1,000 hours to embroider entirely by hand.

Lesage Intérieurs was set up in 1993 by Jean-François Lesage, a fourth-generation embroiderer and son of the celebrated haute couture embroiderer François Lesage. The company is dedicated to producing exquisite bespoke handiwork for interiors projects, and we had been looking for a way to bring a thoroughly contemporary point of view to a very traditional skill set. The Bouroullecs made the perfect partners.

We took the brothers to Lesage’s couture workshops in Paris, where some of the world’s most skilled artisans spend countless hours creating opulent embroidery for the likes of Christian Dior and Chanel. The visit was something of an eye opener for the Bouroullecs, who work mainly with industrial manufacturers such as Vitra, Kvadrat, Magis and Samsung. They now began to see embroidery more as a language and technique they could apply and adapt rather than as just a mere stylistic flourish or archaic symbol of luxury.

Still, the brothers had concerns, ‘a fear of being able to make something with a certain honesty and relevance to the contemporary world’, admits Erwan. And perhaps of misusing the skills made available to them – ‘like being with the world’s best piano player and asking him to play something too lightweight’.

They were determined, though, to bring a new energy and punch to the art. ‘We did not want to approach it just as a picture, something decorative.’ They had already been researching digital software coding for a client and wanted to see how they could make that work for this project. ‘Embroidery is a way to make pictures or something graphic, something that people recognise, like uniforms for the army, embedded with very clear codes or signs.’ Yet in an era of Smartphone photography, ‘people can’t read the embroidery – or they have lost the ability to read it’, so they found a solution where ‘software would act as a translator for an ancient technique, to speak the words of a contemporary picture’.

Taking inspiration from our holy theme, the project was named ‘The Veil’, and its execution took place in Lesage’s Vastrakala workshop in Chennai, India. To create their veil, the designers chose to use a fabric by Kvadrat, a company with whom they have a longstanding connection. Designed by Erik Ole Jørgensen in 1987, ‘Time 300’ is a yarn-dyed Trivera fabric, which uses a weaving process that employs two different shades – one in the weft and the other in the warp – to create a subtle two-tone effect. The fabric was stretched over a giant wooden loom, held in place with straps. This allowed more than ten men to work simultaneously on the cloth, which measured 6m x 3m. Oversized pixels, in the form of 7,200 custom-made frosted blue PVC paillettes in three sizes, were then hand-stitched in blue cotton mouliné, a task that involved 180,000 individual stitches from a team of 20, who clocked in more than 1,000 hours.

Traditionally, fabric is embroidered on one side only and lined at the back, but the Bouroullecs requested that the thread be beautifully finished on both sides, so that the piece could be viewed from all angles. Jean-François Lesage says this approach is extremely rare, comparing it to ‘having a back stage as clear as the main stage’. For Lesage, the challenge was ‘mostly to ensure a perfect positioning of each element to respect the architectural aspect of the décor’. He had expected a ‘culture shock’ between ‘the past and the present’, but he and his team found the experience to be positive, constructive and fruitful or, as he put it, ‘a nice encounter between poets’.

Erwan adds, ‘Embroidery is an amazing language, full of diverse expression and manner. In a way, it is like the origin of pixels, with each point making a part of the picture while also conveying its own weight and magic.’ As for the finished piece, the pair were very impressed that it was constructed using so few tools – just a piece of wood to stretch the fabric, a needle, thread, scissors, and hands. Amazingly simple!

As originally featured in the August 2017 issue of Wallpaper* (W*221)

Watch the making of ‘The Veil’ in Lesage Intérieurs’ workshops in Chennai

INFORMATION

For more information, visit Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec’s website, and the Lesage Intérieurs website

‘Christian Dior: Designer of Dreams’ at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, is nothing shy of monumental. Spanning nearly 3,000 sq m of prime space, it first unfolds as a rich, thematic journey throughout the two floors of permanent fashion galleries. Then, as though the second of two acts, visitors proceed towards the museum’s vast nave where the story begins anew, starting with the iconic bar suit from spring 1947, continuing as a chronological focus on the maison’s six designers, and ending with a magically staged ball attended by seven decades of show-stopping gowns.

Not since 1987 has there been a Christian Dior retrospective in Paris. Thirty years later, to mark the maison’s 70th anniversary, this one ranks as the largest yet. Curated by the museum’s director Olivier Gabet, and Florence Müller, who is based at the Denver Art Museum as the Avenir Foundation curator of textile art and fashion, it features upwards of 300 haute couture gowns, many from the museum’s own collection. But arguably even more staggering are all the peripheral objects: the loaned artworks from major institutions, a vast trove of archive materials from the brand’s Dior Heritage department, 700 accessories sorted as a meandering rainbow wall (dubbed ‘Colorama’), plus scores of magazine covers and editorial spreads that testify to how widely and consistently the Dior image has been diffused (Maison Christian Dior was involved in the show beyond financial support).

Rather than forcing one point of view above others, what becomes clear is that the designer’s original vision has been so incredibly respected, preserved and mythologised since his death just ten years after founding his label. Visitors need only glance at the three-storey wall filled silhouettes conceived by all the subsequent creative directors in addition to Dries Van Noten, Alber Elbaz, Comme des Garçons, Alexander McQueen, Pierre Cardin, Yohji Yamamoto and others to sense that his influence and artistic spirit has been kept alive.

Within the exhibition’s biographical gallery, just down from a striking portrait of the designer by artist Bernard Buffet, he appears on a Time magazine cover dated March 4,1957 holding a giant pair of scissors. In his book, Christian Dior and I, he referred to ‘a small bloodless revolution – made by the scissors rather than the sword – whose reverberations extend to all corners of the world.’ Now consider last year’s must-have ‘Dio(r)evolution’ t-shirt, which Müller happened to be wearing four days before the opening when she and Gabet met for our interview.

’His intention was not to be a revolutionary; he was seeing himself more as a reactionary. It was a reaction against the fashion of the war,’ she explained. ‘It was a reaction that became a revolution. But it was not his intention; I think he was more subtle than this.’

Is the show subtle? Not to the extent that the exceptional scenography, overseen by Nathalie Crinière, presents a steady stream of visually stimulating backdrops, from the illuminated outlines of the 30 Avenue Montaigne façade projected onto the museum walls (don’t miss the upper oval medallion with its highlight reel of runway shows), to the thousands of white flowers suspended from the ceiling in the room exploring the maison’s myriad floral-inspired dresses.

The ambiance in the nave becomes something of a dreamscape thanks to projections of the baroque paintings from the Galerie des Glaces at Versailles, a simulated starry sky, and sparkling gold dust (Jean Cocteau famously noted how Mr Dior’s name was a near homophone with d’or, or gold). Here, in the presence of his glistening Junon and Venus gowns – along with at least two dozen others from Yves Saint Laurent through to Maria Grazia Chiuri – such overwhelming beauty successfully perpetuates the fashion fairytale.

But then to hear Gabet describe the selection process for the roughly 100 works of art placed throughout the exhibition is to also detect connections, surprises, and yes, subtleties that give the show added subtance. For while the paintings by Sterling Ruby and Agnes Martin adjacent to dresses by Raf Simons are obvious complements given his affinity for both artists; a torso of Nefertiti from the Louvre’s Egyptian department was only later discovered to exist as a photo in Galliano’s notebook. ‘It’s always when you are respectful to the artwork in the context of fashion that these beautiful and poetic things happen,’ Gabet suggested. ‘The point was not to be automatic but to always find the right and legitimate way.’

Mr Dior, after all, was a gallerist and art dealer before he became a designer; he revolved in creative circles with the likes of Salvador Dalí and Christian Bérard and mounted a surrealist show with his partner, Pierre Colle, in 1923. Chances are, he would have derived pleasure from seeing the modern maiden painted by Romaine Brooks in 1912, and a Fantin-Latour still life as juxtapositions to the floral dresses. Like other intimate vignettes in the show, it felt immune from any imposition of Dior, the mega-brand.

And it would be easy to declare the Colorama fixture the most apparent aspect of this with all the shoes, bags, hats, jewellery and perfume bottles. But Gabet sees it another way, rightfully pointing out how many of the objects represent collaborations with Stephen Jones, Roger Vivier, Swarovski (which developed the Aurora Borealis crystal for Mr Dior in 1956). ‘We are showing all the possibilities of the métiers d’art and craftsmanship technical virtuosity of the house of Dior.’

Incidentally, the exhibition includes an alcove where actual artisans will be stationed on a weekly basis to show off the savoir-faire before visitors’ eyes. That the show has debuted two days after Chiuri’s autumn/winter collection on Monday, is proof that the Dior story, for the first time filtered through a feminine voice, continues to play out beyond the museum walls in real time.

Gabet and Müller both pointed out that with this level of couture, the dresses didn’t simply slip onto the mannequins; they go through a meticulous process called mannequinage. ‘It’s a little industry by itself for the scale this show,’ said Gabet. Müller summed it up best: ‘You have to remember, he’s like a monument,’ she said. ‘You’ve entered into a legend.’

INFORMATION

‘Christian Dior: Designer of Dreams’ is on view until 7 January 2018. For more information, visit the Les Arts Décoratifs website

ADDRESS

Les Arts Décoratifs
107 rue de Rivoli
75001 Paris

VIEW GOOGLE MAPS

For her second ready-to-wear collection for Christian Dior, Maria Grazia Chiuri turned to a quote from the founder of the French house: ‘Among all colours, navy blue is the only one which can compete with black, it has all the same qualities.’ With a collection which celebrated this versatility of the hue, Chiuri worked with regular collaborators Bureau Betak on a runway set at the Musée Rodin, which emphasised her inspiration.

The set took a month to erect and dismantle; the tent space, featuring a double runway, was lined with 600 sq m of mirror, which reflected the navy taffeta, velvet and denim creations on the runway. The catwalk itself resembled a beautiful abstract blue watercolour, which took over 150 hours to paint by hand, and was imbued with a smoky blueish haze as the models took to the catwalk.

When Christian Dior launched his couture house in 1947’s post-war Paris, he broke away from the rationing that also applied to fabrics at the time: his wasp-waisted dresses flared out with abundance.

Dior’s New Look – a term coined by Carmel Snow – revolutionised women’s fashion by injecting it with a healthy dose of optimism and sensuality. This is where Dior by Christian Dior commences, the first volume of a seven-part series published by Assouline, in which the French fashion house celebrates 70 years of its revolutionary legacy. Each volume is dedicated to a creative director, from M Dior to Yves Saint Laurent, John Galliano to Raf Simons – without forgetting the designer currently at the helm: Maria Grazia Chiuri.

Elegantly laid-out with single images on each page, the book series is curated by Olivier Saillard, the director of Paris’ Palais Galliera museum, one of the most knowledgeable and respected fashion historians working today.

The book’s historical black-and-white images interact dynamically with the theatrical chiaroscuro set-ups of Christian Dior ensembles on mannequins, shot by Laziz Hamani. It also visually synthesises the codes that combine to create Dior’s recognisable DNA. Inside, Hamani’s crystal-clear close-ups of haute couture fabrics include the tulle petals of a floral-inspired evening gown embroidered with blue sequins, and fabric representations of the house’s signature symbols, such as a lily of the valley detail on a 1955 afternoon silhouette.

The volume is interspersed with quotations from M Dior, and completed with precise information on materials, previous owners and the current institutions where the pieces are being conserved. It offers a stately idea of the foundations laid by M Christian Dior from his revolutionary New Look silhouette, until his final A/W 1957 Fuseau collection, which have given a creative foothold to the six other designers following in his footsteps. 

INFORMATION

Dior by Christian Dior, $195, published by Assouline. For more information, visit the Dior website and the Assouline website

Mood board: Maria Grazia Chiuri’s debut at Dior was bound to be a turning point of sorts. Her female gaze made all the difference, and these new Dior pieces were more grounded than what we have become used to at the house.
 
Best in show: Chiuri’s love for adornment shone through in the embellished sheer tulle skirts with gilded hearts, insect embroidery, floral lace and wistfully illustrated sheer silk dresses.
 
Finishing touches: J’Adior, a playful riff on the houses successful J’adore Dior tagline of the Galliano years, was placed on the straps of chain bags – perhaps Chiuri’s way of showing her confidence in her capacity of filling her predecessors’ shoes.

INFORMATION

Photography: Jason Lloyd-Evans

When Christian Dior presented his first collection to the press nearly seven decades ago, it was his New Look designs that had the fashion world buzzing for their radical (if not scandalous) forms. From his flower-strewn salon on 30 Montaigne Avenue – a ‘decorated but not decorative’, classically elegant space – the 42-year-old designer made fashion history.

These days, in a world where social media rules, fashion brands are devoting the same painstaking craftsmanship into increasingly ambitious show sets as they do their collections – with budgets to match. Shows have become an essential extension of brands, with dazzling installations, bespoke soundtracks, and multi-sensory experiences deemed the new standard. From orchestras to neon basketball courts, fashion houses are embroiled in a game of one-upmanship designed to cater to a global tech-centric audience.

A new book, The Fashion Set: The Art of the Fashion Show, celebrates the supercharged evolution of the modern runway, featuring over 100 images from the world’s foremost fashion houses including Louis Vuitton, Prada, Givenchy, Saint Laurent, Chanel and Fendi. Edited by prolific fashion commentator Federico Poletti, and with essays by Diane Pernet and Colin McDowell, the book offers a compelling overview of recent fashion shows.

Sets are now defined by how photogenic – or rather, Instagrammable – they are, with brands plotting bigger and bolder ways to bank those likes. Karl Lagerfeld has conjured spectacular mise-en-scènes including a supermarket and even an airport terminal for Chanel. Dries Van Noten presented a fairy-tale spectacle, laying his models down on a moss-like carpet by Argentinean artist Alexandra Kehayoglou in lieu of a runway.

Other fashion houses have commandeered architectural icons where the spectacle is the location itself. Raf Simons recently opted for a sojourn in sunny Cannes where Pierre Cardin’s inimitable Bubble House formed the otherworldly backdrop to the Dior’s 2016 Cruise collection. Elsewhere that same season, Louis Vuitton’s then-creative director Nicolas Ghesquière whisked us away to Palm Springs, moving into the John Lautner-designed Bob and Dolores Hope Estate.

In the fleeting world of fashion, the long-time creative coupling of Prada and Rem Koolhaas’ research and design studio AMO has been a reassuring constant each season. In one especially memorable menswear outing, Miuccia Prada turned to golf for inspiration (even though it was, by her own admission, a sport she hated). Cue AMO’s coolly calculated interpretation of an indoor golf course, setting the stage with green Astroturf while guests perched on rows of sky-blue cubes.

Likewise, intriguing sets are often born from designers taking a conceptual turn. Creative duo Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez eschewed the conventional fashion show for Proenza Schouler’s pre-spring showing in Florence, collaborating with three artists to create a video, an installation and a live performance. Donatella Versace said of the space age setting for her autumn/winter 2016 menswear show: ‘I’m thinking of the future. This is the ultimate expression of the future: space.’

Fashion, though, is a fickle creature by its very nature, restlessly searching for new ways to reinvent itself. Designers may very well soon eschew thrilling theatrics for more austere performances (Vionnet’s entrancingly austere S/S15 ballet-inspired set comes to mind). And with the growing popularity of augmented reality and technological innovations such as Oculus Rift, runways now have the potential to evolve beyond the physical realm.

We have already witnessed holograms at Alexander McQueen and the first 4D fashion show care of Ralph Lauren Polo. Most recently, Tommy Hilfiger populated his front row with social media stars for his first see-now, buy-now show, as consumers look for instant gratification both on and off the catwalk. Facebook, meanwhile, has been forging a new path with its recently launched 360 photo and video technology, a thought-stirring taster of things to come as it applies this innovation to fashion shows. The once far-fetched prospect of a fashion house connecting its audience through a flawlessly crafted virtual reality now seems plausible, even imminent. One thing is for certain: the future of fashion set design is limitless.

INFORMATION

The Fashion Set: The Art of the Fashion Show is published by ROADS Publishing, £40. For more information, visit the website

Raf Simons’ paved the front of the Louvre’s Cour Carrée with a multifaceted mirror that distorted the immaculate lines of the building’s classical 18th century façade. The same kind of twisting occurred once inside the show, where the clothes were imbued with - at least in historic terms - a split personality. The 18th century provided fertile ground for Simons’ remixed influences, from the rural countryside to glamorous court palaces, which manifested themselves in a variety of silhouettes, cuts and materials. Circle skirts came reared with humped backs; dresses were trimmed in rows of microscopic fabric buttons; sleeves had the pomp of court dress; while velvet gilets tumbled to the ground like grand, sweeping frock coats. Most intriguing, however, were the more humble iterations of that period, like a calico print cotton that was cut into modern shapes and paired up with 1980s-style black tailored separates, or the old-fashioned nightgowns that found new life as crispy, airy cotton dresses. Simons anchored his looks with witchy-looking boots constructed from knitted sock uppers. The best looks in this collection, however, were those where Simons’ icy modernism popped out: the micro jacquard suiting was excellent as were the figure-hugging button-trimmed ¾ length skirts, paired with turtlenecks and lace tops.

Under a ceiling of 'electric flowering' designed to echo urban lights, artistic director Raf Simons opened his show, devoted to 'city silhouettes', with a procession of masculine tailoring and power-wielding coats, cropped at the elbow as though pushed up and ready for business. This season even Simons' heels were on the go, morphing a training shoe into an ankle-strapped platform, complete with a fluorescent sports stripe. Ushering in the new workforce were sleek, peaked lapel pantsuits in maroon, bottle green and black, with each Dior employee carrying a hyper-hued coat over her forearm. Although it was soon time to dial in the flou: originating from men's business shirts, dresses came fluted, rather than ruffled, with swinging asymmetrical hemlines. Moving into cocktail hour, electric-hued, scoop front evening looks used 1990s-style side splits to dramatic effect when paired with floral embroidery. Then came the designer's brogue lacings that stitched up form-fitting dresses and coats in the place of corsetry, followed by elegant quilted duvet dresses for the work-weary, seductively cropped in the front. Dior's dream sequence, described by the tour de force designer as 'an idea of the romantic and the real, a world of possibilities', restfully finished with sheer embroidered columns, worn over homely tees.

The latest in a long line of cross-pollinatory projects between the worlds of film and fashion, the creative minds at Christian Dior will this month release a short film (shown above) by renowned director, Olivier Dahan.

Starring the reticent Gallic beauty, Marrion Cotillard (of La Vie en Rose fame), the film is a self-celebratory tribute to Dior's sublime Parisian style and the product at the centre of the project - The Lady Dior bag.

Supremely French, the six-minute short - The Lady Noire Affair – tells the story of a well-dressed heroine who sets out to save a dashing young man who (in a contemporaneous twist) is being held captive by an evil banker.

Set to be the first in a series of four similar celluloid projects, the Lady Noire Affiair - produced by Christian Dior and conceived by John Galliano - is a decadent noir-esque nod to the beautiful people, objects and (most importantly) clothes that line the gilded streets of Paris.

Taking its cue from filmic forays by Chanel (featuring the expensive talents of both Nicole Kidman and Audrey Tatou) and Gwyneth Paltrow's bag-chasing outing at Tod's - Dior's Hitchcockian stab at the silver screen should lend a little cinematic magic to Dior's already shimmering brand.

‘Christian Dior and Chinese Artists’, which opened November 15 at Beijing's Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, is the latest public clinch between fashion and art. As well as sumptuous and outrageously flamboyant recent Dior pieces by John Galliano and original Christian Dior creations, the show also features specially commissioned works by top Chinese artists, whose brief was to comment on what Dior is, stands for, or makes - basically they had to artistically express Dior.

See how top Chinese artists captured the spirit of Dior in their work n

Conceptually it's a mixed bag but the ambition and visual results are pretty amazing. Li Songsong's 23-feet high Lady Dior Bag is made out of carefully interlaced fluorescent tubes; Wang Qingsong has created an epic Last Supper featuring beautiful fashion models in new Galliano outfits and the artist himself as Jesus in hospital pyjamas (hospital drips replace the holy bread and wine).

There’s also a recreation of the Dior atelier in white porcelain by the ceramicist Liu Jianhua, and a ten feet high painting of Galliano by graffiti artist Zhang Dali (whose graffiti tag is 'AK 47').

Chinese art has been hot for at least ten years but never hotter than now. It follows contemporary art everywhere in being rather attention grabbing and sensational, shunning abstraction and subtlety, going for the headlines, but it deserves special consideration because of the unique historical context.

Until relatively recently Chinese art was all official bland portraits of the leader and slogan-infested propaganda for heroic workers. As China opened up to the west economically, the official hold on art was relaxed and artists emerged who were willing to respond to the odd new situation that China found itself in.

A new society, neither east nor west but a hybrid of the two, with the general population full of anxiety about the new spirit of the times: afraid that progress might be overwhelming and at the same time that it might not come fast enough. That weird double-edged threat/promise explains the mood of new Chinese art, and the appeal in particular of this art and fashion celebration.

It's not a lot of mutual back slapping, but a rather strange party full of bizarre bitter-sweet sights.

For ‘Christian Dior and Chinese Artists’ Lu Hao makes a huge architectural installation out of Plexiglas that houses the ‘muguet,’ the iconic Dior flower. Lu Hao is famous for using his architectural pieces to comment on the real estate scams that go on in China, where buildings will go up very quickly once the finance is in place but the buildings remain half finished and empty of residents. Wang Qingsong's Last Supper is also situated in a mock-up of such a building. The artists want to celebrate luxury but also draw attention to injustice: they don't just say the right left-leaning things – they really go for it.