Raf Simons described the stunning set for Dior's Couture show today as part church, part garden, part nightclub in Ibiza. The pointillist-painted panels could have been stained-glass windows—or flowers. The purple grass carpet worked perfectly well as an acid hallucination at a festival. In fact, a hallucinatory quality penetrated the entire presentation. "Dior is always a fairy tale, no matter what I'm doing," Simons said with a knowing laugh, but today's show had a special through-the-looking-glass magic. It was those sleeves that did it.
The sleeve was a point of particular obsession for Cristóbal Balenciaga, the master of them all. Looking at Simons' sleeve treatments, it was easy to see why these dangly appurtenances to a human form should become the focal point for fashion's finest minds. The opportunity a sleeve offers to deconstruct and build anew is unparalleled. And that was on Simons' mind. "Fighting out of Dior's DNA," he called it. "We wanted to deconstruct such a loaded heritage, specifically in the coats."
The coats! Simons' injection of his own cultural heritage into Dior's mainline referred back to the Flemish masters and the sculptural drape, the velvety weight that men like Vermeer were able to communicate in paint, their models serenely poised with arms folded. Simons claimed his design process began with a basic square blanket, into which a hole was cut and a sleeve attached. The result was a coat/cape hybrid that yielded a result as spectacular as a swingy black cashmere trapeze with a single sleeve of lustrous sable extending from one side. There was substance, but there was movement. The contrast of lightness and weight was at the very core of the collection.
Dior's femmes fleurs, his flowers, have been a guiding light for Simons in his time at the house. But he found a new garden this time: Flemish painter Hieronymus Bosch's fantastical Garden of Earthly Delights, with its ultimate contrast between Adam and Eve's Paradise and the Purgatory into which they were cast when they disobeyed God. Today's purple catwalk was studded with huge lumpen objects that Simons imagined as forbidden fruit. The weight of his outerwear was balanced by ethereal dresses composed of cut feathers or rippling pleats. There was a monastic purity in white chiffon and triple organza Guinevere dresses, and velvet coats clutched demurely (echoing Simons' last collection for Jil Sander). But then there was an abstract chain mail layered over that purity, and the deep slits in coats and dresses (two were even entirely open at the side) translated into a deeply sexual physicality, striking from a designer who was once considered a master of rigorous understatement.
It was telling that Simons was fascinated by Dior's profligacy with his New Look. "Coming out of the austerity of the Second World War, Dior was inspired by something he wasn't supposed to be inspired by," he said. "Glamour, excess, too much." Seventy years later, Raf Simons is coming to the same primal realization: forbidden fruit tastes sweetest.
