Valerio Mezzanotti for The New York Times Christian Dior, spring 2014. Imagination exhilarates, and that’s what Raf Simons of Dior does for the fashion industry. He did that in men’s wear for years. But now, after less than two years at Dior, he has everyone’s attention.
Valerio Mezzanotti for The New York Times Christian Dior, spring 2014. His spring ready-to-wear collection again revisited the Dior garden theme, with a wire canopy over the show space (behind the Musée Rodin) completely filled in with flowers and vines. The whole space measured about 3,000 square meters, said Sidney Toledano, the chief executive of Dior, as he greeted guests on Friday. Some of the flowers were fresh and some were fake, their artificiality accentuated with neon paint. For his debut show, Mr. Simons lined rooms in fresh flowers. If this jungle garden seemed a bit of a poisonous fantasy, well, that was the intention.
“I wanted a harder attitude,” Mr. Simons said. He means something not conventionally “hard,” like motorcycle leathers or grunge, or literally hard, like bonded fabrics. Rather, I think, he means something that is a bit futuristic, maybe a little harsh, and quite possibly alienating. This is adult stuff.
It’s fascinating to see Mr. Simons take his understanding of Christian Dior’s fashion and begin to add more of his own ideas. He wants fashion that provokes thought and crosses mental barriers. As it happens, most of the clothes in this powerful collection are beautiful, certainly wearable, and unlike anything else on the runways. I can imagine retailers quaking a bit in their boots, because a lot of what Mr. Simons proposed is new.
His first collections for Dior really addressed shape. This time, he’s less involved with the language of shape. You might say the ideas are freer. For instance, he presented cotton shirt dresses: slim, simply cut with a twist effect in front, and an off-center keyhole opening. Underneath is a contrast top, including one with navy beading. The look was gorgeous, a combination of classically chic and vaguely rough.
There were the opening jackets, pin-neat, with matching shorts that finished with pleated print organza: such a simple idea. Pleating was a big story of the collection. There were some wonderful day skirts with bias sunray pleats, including one in soda pink with a keyhole opening on one hip. Sweaters were sheer, almost spongy to the touch, and one had club badges. The badges also appeared on a tailored jacket, and on a good-looking sac bag. I’m pretty sure that some of Mr. Simons’s early men’s shows included badges. Of course, they imply a club or a sect.
In his men’s shows, he has also used words for graphic effect. At Dior, they appeared on bands that ensnared floral printed dresses (in deep shades of blue, for instance), and some of the phrases were “ultra-violet mouth” and “always changing forever.” Mr. Simons said he and his design team came up with the words. In design, the dresses were a contradiction between the softness of the pleats, the prettiness of the flowers, and the insistence — almost the artificial intrusion — of the words. The dresses were at once fluid and bound.
The collection offered so many things to look at, from the cut of the shirt dresses, to the wisteria-like clumps of beaded necklaces, to the intense colors (of which Mr. Simons is the absolute master), to the new interpretation of Dior’s tailoring.
It is no wonder that so many other designers look to him for inspiration.
Mr. Toledano is certainly happy. “It’s not only the experts who understand what Raf is doing, but it’s also people worldwide,” he said. “He’s bringing Dior somewhere.”
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