The stars were aligned at Dior’s Haute Couture
fashion show in Paris on Monday.
The spring-summer collection itself
was
all groovily “Barbarella,” with fluorescent orange boots and skintight catsuits with flower-power
patterns worn by models descending from a multi-level space-opera set
purpose-built in the gardens of Paris’s Rodin Museum.

David Bowie’s early years London pop washing out of the sound
system, including tunes performed by his stage alter ego Ziggy Stardust. It
was very retro space age — yet designer Raf Simons injected the show
with a look at once sexy and light. “I was always thinking of the future
for so many years and I was always
anti-romanticising the past, but the past can be beautiful too,” he said.

The colourful garments, he said, incarnated “the romance of the 50s, with
the experimentation of the 60s and the liberation of the 70s”.
His ambition was for “something wilder, more sexual, strange and certainly
more liberated for the haute couture and for women”.

Austin Powers piloting

Bright, very bright colours, lines and swirls competed for attention on the
outfits, which ranged from Dior’s trademark thin-waisted, flouncy dresses to
second skins to mid-thigh tunics with latex leggings. All carried on
exquisitely stilettoed shoes and eye-catching boots.

It was as if Austin Powers were piloting the spaceship, headed for
Woodstock with an ultra-glam female party crew on board. Indeed, Dior
itself described the collection as a time-travelling
“hallucinogenic amalgamation” in its production notes.

The idea, it said, was to subvert the typical Dior “femme fleur” image it
has built up over the years.
Flower power, indeed: a nostalgic trip harking back to a breezier, maybe
more innocent, time when fashion, leisure, music and the beginning of mass
travel promised what seemed a bright future of free love and world peace.

Current events in the news may give the lie to that promise, but maybe
that’s why the privileged crowd watching the show applauded so heartily —
hailing this image of hope over reality.
The VIP
crowd putting its well-manicured hands together included Chinese
model-actress Angelababy, 1960s and 1970s American model Marisa Berenson,
and
Bernard Arnaud, the head of the LVMH luxury goods empire that controls Dior.

About ‘love’

Backstage, the couturieres who handmade the garments spoke to AFP about the
challenge of working with material like PVC, which was made into see-through
jackets for some of the numbers.
“We had to learn to work with it — we’d never done that before… find
threads that can’t be seen, that don’t break,” said one, who gave her first
name as Florence.

Simons said he sought to invoke the way women in the 1960s and 1970s
expressed political views through their bodies and what they wore.
The bodysuit, for instance, was “not changing the body — it is the body,
so in that sense I think it’s interesting to communicate directly with
purely
the form of the body.”

Challenging the often-grim news from around the world was a priority, he
admitted.
“This for me is also about love. The ’60s and ’70s were much about love, so
it was a conscious decision to go there right now,” Simons said.
(Marc Burleigh, AFP)

Images: British Vogue
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