On February 12, 1947, Christian Dior showed his first collection to the press on Paris’s Avenue Montaigne. At the sight of the thin-waisted, bust-accentuating cuts, one of Dior’s biggest fans, Harper’s Bazaar Editor-in-Chief Carmel Snow, famously exclaimed, “It’s quite a revolution, dear Christian! Your dresses have such a new look!” The Dior-driven “new look” is something of an origin myth for many fashion historians, touching almost every haute couture development in the 70 years since it was first unveiled.
Dior literally chipped away at a Stockman mannequin to shrink it down to the size of his collection’s ideal model. “We came from an epoch of war and uniforms, with women like soldiers with boxers’ shoulders,” the designer said. “I designed flower women, soft shoulders, full busts, waists as narrow as lianas and skirts as wide as corollas.”
The new, of course, becomes old, but in fashion, the old is also always becoming new again. It’s under this auspice, and from the same Avenue Montaigne salons, that Dior’s Couture Fall 2016 collection comes to us. Lucie Meier and Serge Ruffieux’s final collection as interim directors looked back to Dior’s history for inspiration, drawing principally from Dior’s signature Bar Suit design and playing with waist cinch sizes, locations, and even angles to reconfigure the original New Look silhouette.
The mainly monochromatic palette was also inspired by the late Dior, who said that ““white is simple, pure and goes with everything,” adding that he “could write a whole book about black.” Ruffieux and Meier also cited Picasso as an inspiration “when he chose monochrome over colour to better focus on structure.” By reducing the palette, the designers claim “the collection becomes a study in form and shape.” Aside from black and white, the only other color present on the runway was gold in the form of sculptural embroidery, “worn like jewellery.”
Elongated jackets, clingy sleeves, and reduced volumes help usher the look into the modern day, but the elegance is as timeless as it was in 1947.
