Editor’s Note: Vogue Runway is celebrating “the most wonderful time of the year” by adding six magical—and newly digitized—1990s haute couture shows to our archive. Christian Dior’s fall 1997 collection, designed by John Galliano, was originally presented on January 18, 1999, at the company headquarters on Avenue Montaigne in Paris.
Surrealism was the inspiration for the Christian Dior spring 1999 couture lineup. It’s obvious how much John Galliano and his team enjoyed their research, as almost every aspect of the collection—from concept to clothing to set—is a reference to the movement. For starters, the torn paper “windows” through which the models appear seem to be borrowed from a 1936 Cecil Beaton shoot for Vogue.
Galliano himself introduced the collection and its inspirations, calling out Jean Cocteau (whose line drawings were referenced in a trio of astrology-themed dresses) and Salvador Dalí, especially. Based on the AP report, the gender play in the collection (female models played male roles) was based on what the designer described as Dalí and wife Gala’s “powerplay for sexual dominance.” More interesting, perhaps, were the more direct nods to Dalí’s work in the eye pins and the glittering lobster attached to a dress strap, visual shout-outs both to the artist’s Lobster Telephone and the crustacean he painted on a dress at Elsa Schiaparelli’s request.
The collection was ripe with such allusions: A purse pocket on a black suit nodded to Schiap; Jade Parfitt’s bangles resembled those in a famous Man Ray portrait of heiress Nancy Cunard; the models’ berets looked not unlike the ones worn by Renée Pearl, muse to Jacques-Henri Lartigue. And the list goes on.
The Surrealism movement was about questioning the “norm” and surfacing the subconscious, often through unexpected pairings of objects and ideas—“as beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table” as the writer Comte de Lautréamont famously put it.
The collection was presented at the Dior headquarters to an audience of 60 and repeated six times to accommodate the guest list, according to The Evening Standard. Galliano upped the oddity of his Surrealist soiree by adding to the cast a team of bowlered men who helped show the voluminous wedding dress. In contrast, the clothes, for the most part, were streamlined, elegant, and modern. Celine Dion wore the collection’s white backward suit (another reference to the work of Schiaparelli) to the Academy Awards that year. Though Galliano reverted to the 19th-century references for some of the evening looks, such as a cellophane gown worn by Suzanne von Aichinger that Steven Meisel later photographed on Nicole Kidman for Vogue’s “Portrait of a Lady” sitting, in the face of Y2K and the many unknowns of the digital age Surrealism seemed a fitting fin de siècle theme. As it does again in these pandemic-altered times: The Row’s pre-fall collection includes a backward suit, and “Surrealism Beyond Borders” opens at the The Tate in early 2022.
