From the November 2024 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.
Depending on who you listen to, Christian Dior was either a great liberator of women or a misogynist who didn’t understand them because he wasn’t interested in having sex with them. When he unveiled his first couture collection in Paris in 1947, its fusion of post-war glamour and belle époque-inspired romanticism was shocking enough for Carmel Snow of Harper’s Bazaar to call it the ‘New Look’. Featuring tightly nipped-in waists, exaggerated hips and busts, and enormous skirts, this silhouette shifted the sartorial needle in its embrace of both excess (the famous ‘Bar’ jacket required nearly four metres of silk shantung, while a short taffeta evening gown used 25) and unabashed femininity (wartime clothes, for reasons of both physical practicality and limited resources, tended to be simple, boxy and slightly more androgynous).
Not everyone was a fan. Coco Chanel, who’d spent much of the German occupation having an affair with a Nazi agent and using newly instated Aryan laws to try to oust her Jewish partners from her perfume business, was scathing. ‘Look how ridiculous these women are, wearing clothes by a man who doesn’t know women, never had one, and dreams of being one,’ she said of his debut collection – the homophobia not so much veiled as scantily clad.
The question of what a woman wants to wear, and who is best placed to dress her, underpins the current exhibition at the Kunst-museum Den Haag. It includes pieces by all seven of Dior’s creative directors to date, riffing on familiar topics such as flowers, dreams, silhouettes, cocktail dresses and so on. Voluptuous gowns and embroidered coats are mounted on mannequins across a series of themed rooms, fashion sketches and swatches bringing to life the atelier while cabinets full of costume jewellery glitter like rare fungus. As with ‘Christian Dior: Designer of Dreams’ at the V&A in 2019, parallels are drawn across decades and creative directors. After ten years at his eponymous label, Christian Dior died of a heart attack at the age of 57 and his 21-year-old assistant Yves Saint Laurent took over until 1960.
There is fun to be had in trying to identify the designer before checking the attribution; Dior’s own designs look modest compared to Galliano’s exaggerated flounces; Marc Bohan’s groovy feathers and little frills are a world away from Raf Simons’s clean lines and bright, block colours. Many of the clothes are pure pleasure to look at and accompanied by the stories of their wearers both famous and not; there are plenty of Dutch clients to learn about here. Another highlight is the film reel of scenes featuring Dior designs, brought to life on screen in Gentlemen Marry Brunettes (1955), Paris When it Sizzles (1964) and Arabesque (1966).
The core dialogue, however, is between the label’s founder and its current head, Maria Grazia Chiuri, who, we are repeatedly reminded, is Dior’s first female creative director. In a plush grey room, a reproduction of Dior’s ‘Bar’ jacket is displayed alongside a series of reinterpretations – the most prominent being Chiuri’s. A T-shirt from her debut Spring/Summer 2017 collection bearing the slogan ‘We Should All Be Feminists’ (taken from the title of an essay by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie) is styled underneath a lighter, leaner white jacket, the embellished blue tulle skirt with which it was originally paired switched out for a similarly diaphanous black one. The visual contrast is deliberate. Christian Dior’s corseted rigidity faces off Chiuri’s softness; two silhouettes 70 years apart implying a narrative of social change and growth while aiming to show, as a wall text has it, that ‘both designers have a bold, individual and progressive style […] perfectly in tune with the spirit of the times’.
The T-shirt was criticised at the time for costing $700, a jarringly high price tag for a garment trumpeting the importance of equality. It’s possible to argue that the problem with luxury brands making such claims comes from the gap between message and practice: where are their ready-to-wear clothes and accessories actually produced? How much are their garment workers – often women – paid? Who do they cast to walk on their catwalks? Who is making decisions in the boardroom? Take this route, and the moral high ground is easily claimed.
The real problem with the T-shirt is one of design, and the gap between intention and execution. Chiuri makes admirable and ample reference to women artists and thinkers and to craft traditions and overlooked pockets of women’s history, but what she does with such rich source material often feels flat or even trite. Many of the clothes, especially on the couture side, are extremely pretty and exquisitely made, but nothing that the house is currently producing has transformed how women dress. There is no edge, no revolutionary thinking; just steady brand consolidation.
Dior Héritage reproduction of the ‘Gruau’ evening gown from the Autumn/Winter 1949 haute couture collection designed by Christian Dior. Photo: Viviane Sassen for Kunstmuseum Den Haag
This wouldn’t really matter were it not for the exhibition’s insistence on the uniqueness of Chiuri’s vision – driven by ‘today’s women’, inspired by their ‘divine power’. Designers are always banging on about the ‘modern’ woman and the ‘strong’ woman (my kingdom for a muse who is washed-up and weak-willed). The lack of female creative directors at top fashion labels is a problem, but it won’t be solved by suggesting that women have some innate, let alone mystical, ability to understand what other women want to wear or will want to wear soon enough.
Looking back at Christian Dior’s New Look, it’s evident that what was a godsend for some was a nightmare for others, for the simple reason that we all value different aspects of dress. One woman’s post-war liberation was another’s curtailment. But it is odd to see how frequently comfort is still used as the primary metric to assess whether a designer likes and understands women – to assume that the gauzy tulle skirt is more progressive or even feminist than the stiffened wool one just because it looks more contemporary. Dior currently understands and navigates the market extremely well, but that is not the same as capturing the spirit of the times.
From the November 2024 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.