Paris (AFP) – Stars including Jennifer Lawrence and Natalie Portman were on the front row Tuesday as Dior paid homage to its sixties pop-culture heyday at Paris Fashion Week. The collection highlighted the origins of “Miss Dior” during the 1960s, the moment when the label started feeding the masses with ready-to-wear collections.
The first look on the catwalk was a demure beige suit emblazoned with the “Miss Dior” as if screen-printed. There was a heady mix of nouveau riche fantasy, from gabardine to the little white dress, via tweed and more urban denim and leopard-print styles. The white, beige and gold palette was borrowed from Marc Bohan, who headed Dior’s creation for a quarter-century after the founder, and who died in September.
The “Miss Dior” line appeared amid the revolutionary tumult of 1968, with a daring new vision of femininity with psychedelic touches, and short, daring cuts. It was named after the founder’s sister, Catherine Dior, a resistance hero who suffered a traumatic period in a Nazi concentration camp. It’s a story told in the current Apple TV series “The New Look”, and the stars were present for Tuesday’s show, including Ben Mendelsohn, who plays Christian Dior, and Maisie Williams, who plays Catherine.
“I wouldn’t say I’ve become a fashionista since doing the show, but I’m certainly more appreciative of the role that fashion plays,” Mendelsohn told AFP. “I’m still really just sort of hit with the force of the looks and the enormous variety of it, I mean there’s a lot of pieces there!”
Also in the audience were music stars including Rosalia and Blackpink’s Jisoo — the latter’s presence being largely responsible for the huge crowd of young fans gathered outside on the Concorde plaza. The first full day of the womenswear autumn/winter collections began earlier with the typically classy stylings of Spain’s Victoria and Tomas earlier in the day.
Their show, inspired by Auguste Rodin’s “The Kiss”, featured lots of knotted details and scarves integrated into dresses that evoked classical sculpture. “We wanted to show all these pleats we found in the sculptures, in the pants, wool coats, the sweaters,” Victoria Feldman told AFP. The husband-and-wife team — a rarity in the fashion world — founded their brand in 2012 after she and Tomas Berzins met at a Paris design school. “‘The Kiss’ is really a balance between something very heavy and cold like marble and something warm and fast like movement,” said Feldman.
