Exclusive installation of paper flowers in the Gardens room, which displays flower dresses alongside artworks from Monet to Marc Quinn. Photo credit: Dior
The space is covered with thousands of delicate white paper tendrils and vines draping down from overhead. Beneath them stand dresses in all inspiration of flowers: from a chiffon afternoon dress embroidered with cotton daisies to one couture cocktail dress covered in little green feather sprigs. Facing these dresses on one side of the wall, a Monet iris painting is hanging as if in conversation with the gowns.
This is the Dior Garden, one of many rooms in the 32,000-square-foot ‘Christian Dior: Designer of Dreams’ exhibition at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. Celebrating 70 years of Maison Dior, it’s a big and bold staging of the brand’s story, and underneath that, a subtle retrospective study of the business in fashion. With over 300 haute couture dresses (many from the museum’s own collection) and 700 accessories across 23 themes curated by the museum’s director Olivier Gabet and Florence Müller, curator of textile art and fashion at the Denver Art Museum, it’s a one-hour minimum walk-through show. The superlatives continue ... welcome to the largest Dior exhibition ever held, and the first in France since 1987.
Dior Ball
Dior’s iconic Bar jacket. Photo credit: Dior
Scenographer of the exhibition Nathalie Crinière must have literally dreamed up the second half of the show and realised it with all her technical virtuosity because this is where the oohs and ahhs get drawn out longer.
Front and centre of the nave opposite the fashion floors is the white Bar jacket, the most iconic visual in the 1947 New Look collection for its cinched waist, elevated bust, and padded hips. Dior’s Bar jacket—so named as it was designed for the afternoon cocktails at hotels—was celebrated for ushering a retrospective-yet-revolutionary sense of style. A more-is-more philosophy of adding layers and material to the skirt, for example. This atavism and outfit coming out of a more austere post-war period is referenced again and again in many fashion history books for its boldness. Picture Jeanne Damas or Bella Hadid in this full black skirt, exaggerated shape, and basket-style hat, and it would still look 2017 in the grid of a budding designer’s Instagram account. In fact, there is a three-storey wall right behind filled to the brim with similar silhouettes, not conceived by Dior but by other designers who were influenced by the New Look: Pierre Cardin, Lucien Lelong, Alber Elbaz, Thom Browne, Louis Vuitton, Yohji Yamamoto, Jean Paul Gaultier, Alexander McQueen, and more.
