Dior reinvents Lewis Carroll's Alice for the Brat era at Paris fashion week
A snowy white cross-backed lace pinafore dress was worn with a quivering black silk mohican headdress. Alice's striped stockings were reimagined as lace-up leather gladiator boots. Her frothy skirt became a birdcage crinoline, her girlish ribbons were knotted dog collar-tight at the throat. In the front row, Pamela Anderson smiled beneath a dotted black veil, and Venus Williams was resplendent in tightly coiled braids. A fantastical landscape featuring lions in feather headdresses and plants that sprouted eyes as well as blooms was embroidered all over the walls a stage set in the garden of the Musée Rodin.
Escapism is a diplomatic answer to the tight spot in which many fashion designers now find themselves. Dior, where the designer Maria Grazia Chiuri has spelt out her worldview with feminist slogan T-shirts and advocated for diversity via a long-term collaboration with a Mumbai school for female craftworkers, has been at the forefront of a decade in which progressive principles became the mainstream in fashion.
With Trump's second term shifting the tectonic plates of culture, fashion is feeling the pressure to fall into line. Asked backstage before the show whether politics had influenced this collection, Chiuri said it had not, but added that 'fashion is a playground for the imagination. And in your imagination, you can create for yourself the world that you want to live in'.
Dior is in the headlights of the vibe shift. It is emerging as the most high status wardrobe in the court of Trump, with skirt suits in the distinctively hourglass silhouette of Dior's famous New Look worn by Melania Trump on election night, and by Ivanka Trump at the inauguration ceremony, which was attended by Dior's CEO, Delphine Arnault, and her billionaire father Bernard.
Here, Chiuri swapped the signature New Look for a lesser-known chapter of Dior history, when her job was held by a young Yves Saint Laurent, who presented a new trapeze silhouette consisting of babydoll dresses with a graphic A-line shape that all but ignored the waist. She fused this reference to late 1950s Dior with details borrowed from the gothically charged Alice in Wonderland depicted in Dorothea Tanning's surrealist paintings. Her gravity-defying hair and the jellyfish-tangle of her skirts showed up on the runway. Chiuri said backstage that she liked 'the idea of nonsense'.
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Dior has boomed under Chiuri, its designer since 2016. HSBC recently estimated that revenues more than tripled from €2.7bn (£2.3bn) in 2018 to €9bn in 2023. Because it enjoys a substantial slice of the US luxury market, Dior has benefitted from the recent strength of the dollar. With a new designer creating excitement around its great rival Chanel, however, there have been persistent rumours of a change at Dior. With this collection - spirited, elegant and defiantly disorientating - the usually straight-talking Chiuri gave no clear answers.
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