Raf Simons’s First Dior Collection (original) (raw)
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/05/fashion/raf-simonss-first-dior-collection.html
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Past, Prologue, Dior
At the Dior haute couture show in Paris, each room decked in flowers, an organza gown with thousands of bits of chiffon.Credit...Valerio Mezzanotti for The New York Times
- July 3, 2012
PARIS
THE hardest thing to realize in fashion is that the future lies in the past. The second hardest thing is to forget the past.
That precise turn of mind is what Raf Simons showed in his first collection for Dior, the high point of the fall haute couture shows. In almost every one of the 54 outfits, in the purposeful use of craft, Mr. Simons made a link to the modernity and energy that Christian Dior brought to fashion right after World War II. Those themes included sculptural lines, ravishing color, a preference for pockets, a sense of chic femininity but also ease. Mr. Simons then put those ideas through his own filter.
The collection was beautiful, modest and thoroughly engaging.
With a flair for drama, fashion people routinely describe any change of command in terms of a papal ascension. But this time the sense was legitimate. There are only two great couture houses left in Paris, Chanel and Dior. Karl Lagerfeld has been at Chanel 30 years. Mr. Simons, 44, is only the fifth designer to take over Dior since its founder died, in 1957, and his successor, Yves Saint Laurent, came to prominence.
On top of everything, Dior had the public relations nightmare of John Galliano’s arrest and dismissal in February 2011 for a drunken anti-Semitic rant in a Paris bar. Although his excesses were an open secret, and praised when they were the creative kind, executives at Dior and LVMH, including the chairman Bernard Arnault, were eager to distance themselves from the Galliano era.
But what was Dior’s look for the future?
The search for a new designer took months. Speculation initially centered on Marc Jacobs, Alber Elbaz, Phoebe Philo and Riccardo Tisci, among others. Mr. Simons emerged as a dark horse.
If he was not the most obvious choice for a big-time house, it was perhaps because people underestimated his abilities, or saw them only in the context of the fashion he did for Jil Sander. Through his women’s collections at Sander he completely changed perceptions about minimalism and color. He did that in a matter of a few years. An influential star in men’s wear since the mid-’90s, Mr. Simons did not begin designing women’s fashion until 2005. And he had no experience in haute couture.
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