Dior hats in the 60s

Fabulous or dreary?

It's Dior and costs £3265.

Credit crunch chic, or what to wear for Armageddon

Chanel Haute Couture

Depressing, eh? And here's Dior. Betty Boop meets the Gestapo.

And all this without Victor and Rolf.

Dior: a world of his own

Reports of the first Paris haute couture shows are coming in:

Today's Dior collection was based on the same conceit: clothes that appear girlishly light and frothy, but are in fact based on serious sartorial engineering.

So the torso of a leopard-print ballgown appeared to be wrapped gently around the waist, when in fact the apparent softness concealed a heavy-duty corset beneath; a voluminous opera coat, puffed up and proud as a perfect yorkshire pudding, was fashioned out of silk stiffened and printed to resemble crocodile skin. The art of pulling off dressmaking impossibilities with difficult fabrics is a tradition in haute couture, because it showcases the skill of the designer. Cristobal Balenciaga liked to work in heavy boiled wool because he knew no one else could fashion elegant silhouettes from this lumpish cloth.

But while Madame X wore unadorned black velvet, today's Dior outfits came in jewel-box brights, each encrusted so densely with embroidery that the catwalk resembled a box of giant jelly babies, brightly coloured and sugar-dipped. All the signature silhouettes of haute couture were featured: the cocoon-shaped coats, the mermaid-shaped dresses, the slender-sleeved peplum jackets. The parodic femininity of the tightly corsetted, impossibly long-limbed shapes was emphasised in the virtuoso make-up: feather eyelashes and diamante eyeliner, bringing together the aesthetics of the drag queen with the skill of the world's best make-up artists to stunning effect.

'I think I need more glitter and I think you need more lashes' - Dior at Versailles

Dior

My piece on Dior is in the Telegraph today:

A snapshot of Christian Dior's plump face frozen in fright just before the first model girl sashayed on to his salon floor on 16 February 1947 shows the very moment that fashion history was about to be made. It is not always easy to pin down when something decisively changes, but Dior's first collection was one of those occasions when we can put a date and a place to a total alteration in fashion consciousness. The women in the audience at that first show sat on their gilt chairs dressed in square-shouldered, wartime suits with skimpy skirts. Five days later Nancy Mitford would write to her sister Diana Mosley that her life had been made a desert of gloom, for now all her clothes had been rendered, at a stroke, unwearable. She just had to have one of the new dresses with their tiny waists, narrow sloping shoulders and pavement-skimming skirts. Customers, she wrote, were fighting over them, and it was like a scene at a bargain-basement sale just trying to place an order.

Read on

Thought for the day

My dream is to save [women] from nature. Christian Dior

Chanel wins

I'm not surprised that Chanel won The Thoughtful Dresser poll (it can't have helped poor old Christian that this very site has a picture of her at the top.) Seeing Dior's dresses up close at the Golden Age of Couture show at the V&A (hurry on down there if you are in or can get to London), you understand what a consummate couturier he was. If I absolutely had to choose one dress from either of them, I think it would be a Dior. In a Dior dress you become someone else, you are the essence of the feminine. He seems to understand a woman's soul. In a Dior dress you dream, no - you become what you dream of. You are wearing the dress of a poet.

But Chanel understands a woman's life, the one she lives every day. She was one of the great pioneers of Modernism, of clothes to be worn in the machine age. She changed everything she touched, even the way we smell.

I wrote a piece about Chanel in the Telegraph a few weeks ago, exploring her life and work:

The very first LBD, the Ford of dresses, she called it, referring to the Model T car built on a production line for the masses, was designed to be democratic; any woman could wear one. The original design shows a long-sleeved, slim-hipped dress, gathered low at the waist and reaching to just below the knee. Its only adornments are two pleated Vs dropping from the shoulders and rising from the hem, meeting in the middle to further create the illusion of slimness. You could step out in it today and no one would notice that you were wearing something designed more than 80 years ago. Chanel would develop this concept for the rest of her life, altering the fabrics, adding sequins or chiffon trains, but the underlying structure remained. A black dress, with dropped waist and schoolgirl white collars and cuffs, worn over leather footless tights from 2003 reveals how radical her thought was. 'A fashion that goes out of fashion overnight is a distraction, not a fashion,' she said.

Dior or Chanel? The Thoughtful Dresser poll

Who was the most important designer of the twentieth century? Coco Chanel, who invented modern dress and who liberated women for modern times? Or Christian Dior whose New Look created some of the most beautiful clothes ever made?

Cast your vote in the Thoughtful Dresser Poll on the right.