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How Christian Dior's first digital couture show bore similarities to its historic post-War collection

Christian Dior couture  - Christian Dior
Christian Dior couture - Christian Dior

In the summer of 1944, shortly after Paris had been liberated but war was still raging in the rest of the world, a cohort of French designers conjured up an audacious scheme to ensure Paris remained the capital of haute couture in the post-war world. (The Nazis had wanted to transfer it lock stock and thread to Berlin.)

Le Petit Théâtre de la Mode, (or the miniature theatre of fashion), was a collection of 70cm high dolls dressed in scaled down replicas of the designers’ collections – each one hand sewn, embroidered and jewelled in the fashion houses’ own exacting ateliers.

If the clients couldn’t come to Paris, then Paris would go to the clients, dispatched in trunks around the world, so that customers could see the workmanship up close.

Christian Dior 1944 Miniature mannequin during a Fashion Theater - Getty Images / Christian Dior
Christian Dior 1944 Miniature mannequin during a Fashion Theater - Getty Images / Christian Dior

Leap forward eight decades to the summer of 2020, and Dior is reviving this charming practice. As well as Monday’s digital catwalk show, serious clients will be sent slightly smaller dolls (either 55cm or 57cm) in their requested outfits, alongside full-scale calico toiles (a canvas template they can try on) and fabric swatches.

Because of social distancing rules, it’s not possible for the elegant couture sales force from Dior’s Paris couture salon to travel to Dubai or Shanghai to fit the toiles as they would normally. Instead, tailors and seamstresses from Dior’s local boutiques will take measurements and relay them back to Paris.

If this seems exceptionally elaborate that’s because even now, when privilege is often excoriated, even in a luxury-centric economy like France’s, Paris Couture occupies an exceptional place in the national psyche.

It’s a benchmark of French artisanship (and the main benefactor), tradition and an anchor of its sense of superior culture. As Bruno Pavlovsky, President of Fashion at Chanel, Dior’s great rival said recently, “the fashion show must go on – it’s part of French tradition”.

No pressure then, on Maria Grazia Chiuri, Dior’s first female creative director, who oversaw much of this collection locked down in her native Rome, using her daughter Rachele as a fit model. As well as designing the collection and fleshing out her vision with film-maker Matteo Garrone, she had to set up a chain of communication with Dior’s 200 petits-mains – the tailors and hand-sewers – who were all working from home.

Chiuri is blessed in Dior’s seamless technology, which enabled her to give “backstage” previews to small clusters of journalists both before and after the show, and in its budgets which allowed her to collaborate with Garrone, a Palme d’Or winning director.

Garrone’s master step was to incorporate couture’s unique, slow-fashion process into his film and blend it with mermaids. Footage of the white-coated atelier team in Paris segued into watery scenes of mermaids and naiads to the haunting soundtrack of Satie’s Six Gnossiennes (in itself a musical harbinger of a world turbulence).

Who doesn’t love a mermaid and a Greek sprite, especially when they’re emerging from a scenic river in wisps of earth-coloured chiffon and gazing in covetous wonder at a trunk, fashioned as a miniature version of Dior’s HQ in Paris on the Avenue Montaigne, which had been carried to the riverbank by liveried porters?

Christian Dior Autumn/Winter 2020 Couture collection - Christian Dior
Christian Dior Autumn/Winter 2020 Couture collection - Christian Dior

Inside the trunk were those scaled-down mannequins, whose outfits are so ravishing that a nymph, distracted from her a steamy tryst with a centaur, breaks away to try one on. (There's far more sexual tension in this film than on the usual catwalk, but conversely negligible BAME representation which seems like a missed opportunity.)

I counted around 20 outfits, from bronze pleated Pre-Raphaelite wisps of dresses to voluminous pleated-ruffle ball gowns and a jet-embroidered white cashmere coat, most as floaty and light as the ripples on those mermaids’ backs. This is far fewer than a traditional Dior couture show, which might feature around 50 looks, but because they were integrated into the film’s narrative, the cumulative experience was compelling.

Since anyone could watch this on Dior’s own website, I hijacked my husband to watch this with me at home for the layperson’s verdict: he thought it made traditional catwalk shows seem archaic.

Chiuri, one of fashion’s most vocal feminists, now back in Paris, explained she’d been inspired by Lee Miller, the model, muse and photographer whose spirited androgynous style is far from the New Look that Christian Dior unveiled in 1947 as his riposte to wartime rationing.

With its yards of ankle-grazing fabric and tightly cinched waists, it proved to be hugely influential for the next ten years (and beyond). Not everyone was a fan. Coco Chanel sneered that Dior didn’t so much dress women as upholster them.

Chiuri’s vision is as far from upholstery as possible – gauzy, impressionistic layers that offer a dreamy optimism of comfort and nature, but above all a vision for a new kind of show.

Watch the Haute Couture autumn/winter 2020 digital shows here.

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