There were mountains of delphiniums shipped in to decorate the Dior tent and mountains of people clogging the Rue de Rivoli entrance, jostling for a glimpse of Rihanna. Inside, though? There was Raf Simons backstage, talking about keeping things simple and quiet: "It’s a calm one, and very soft—away from the overdone. I didn’t want to embellish. So I was thinking about the South of France—rainbows and the simple things. And there’s a bit of Victoriana: something of that film Picnic at Hanging Rock. With a slight sexual undertone of darkness.”
Simons can lay reasonable claim to have been the one to start both the current Victoriana-nightdress trend and the intergalactic astronaut trends that are running through so many collections this season—he proposed both themes in his Spring 2015 ready-to-wear show. But part of the responsibility for helming a behemoth brand like Christian Dior is filling stores with daywear for women who like feminine things rather than conceptual clothes, and this season he attended to servicing it.
His solution was to pair scallop-edged handkerchief cotton dresses, little shorts, and bodices with black tailoring. The jackets—softened from the corseted New Look hourglass—skimmed the body and broke into bands of micro pleats at the hem, a masculine-feminine merge suggesting the techniques that went into the trains of Victorian and Edwardian dresses. The sexual undertone? Not so much in the clothes as at the necks, which were bound with tight scarves and chokers, each carrying a single jewel and dangling a metal tag, some of which read 1947, the date of Dior’s revolutionary New Look collection. In terms of fashion, though, there was nothing very disturbing or challenging in any of this. Deliberately so: In a season where many collections have apparently neglected to remember that there might be warm weather in 2016, Dior is one place where fresh summer options will be found.
