Paris: The sky was the limit for powerhouse Christian Dior which built an entire floral mountain within the Louvre to house its 15 minute show at Paris Fashion Week. On the front row was Rihanna, attracting almost as much attention as the decor. The pop star and Dior brand ambassador swooped into the Louvre to a flurry of paparazzi flashes, and posed in front of a myriad of blue flowers. The backdrop complemented the stylish singer’s clothes — a pink Dior couture cape dress from the autumn-winter collection, with an exaggerated pocket, and raunchy boots.
Inside, she appeared relaxed and took selfies, even as the media scrum around her wall of bodyguards ballooned to near chaos.
It took 400,000 stalks of blue Delphinium flowers, 40 tons of sawed lawn, and 100 people working day and night for over three weeks.
An entire mountain, replete with flaming blue blooms which glistened in the sun, was the near-impossible feat of creation that powerhouse Christian Dior achieved for their Friday show.
The audacity of the size — 60 meters wide and 18 meters high — was made even more audacious by its location: inside the oldest courtyard of the Louvre museum, of which the 16th century stones poked out behind the flowers.
Bloggers gawped, models used it as a posing backdrop, Elizabeth Olsen pouted, and Rihanna swooped past it as a flurry of paparazzi snaps captured the unlikely sight.
As soon as the show ended, lasting a mere 15 minutes, workers readied themselves to take it all back down again.
Who ever said fashion was fleeting?
Raf Simons took a fresh and naturalistic approach for Dior’s spring-summer looks: clothes that were as light as the scents wafting from the flower-filled decor.
As ever, for “cerebral” Simons, the references were encyclopedic.
“For this collection I wanted to look at something rougher and more natural than the garden,” Simons’ statement in the show notes read. “At the same time, and just as in nature, I wanted to find a new kind of precision, purity and ease.”
The statement appeared to nod to both Simons’ minimalist approach, but also to the heritage of Christian Dior, who decorated the room of his first haute couture show in 1947 with delphiniums. In his third year of designing for Dior, Simons is stretching away from pure homage to a kind of fusion of his own design sensibilities and that of the house he represents.
This season’s muse was Victorian-style underwear: high-waisted knickers, in white cotton with a circular trim.
They were worn under loose, sheer organza dresses or underneath Dior’s famed “bar jacket” that was taken from the 1949 archive and given a graphic, menswear twist. Simons is, after all, a master of gender-bending. The delicate men’s tailoring continued in some three-piece suits with delicate horizontal pinstripes and military jackets.
There were some wonderful contradictions and contrasts that displayed the deceptive simplicity of the Dior designs.
Historical turn-of-the-century sleeves — gathered, voluminous and normally destined for heavy fabrics — were given a diaphanous make-over in weightless, transparent pink striped silk organza, above Victorian lingerie.
It proves the talent of Simons: rich in his referencing, but light in execution.
