Post-Galliano, Dior embraces eclecticism

Dior chief executive Sidney Toledano said they are in no hurry to pick a new creative director.

PARIS:

Christian Dior, taking its time finding a successor to John Galliano, firmly distanced itself from the disgraced British designer with an eclectic collection at the Paris haute couture shows.

Four months after firing Galliano over alleged racist slurs, Dior tasked his longtime right-hand man Bill Gaytten to oversee a show inspired by everything from early 1980s Paris nightlife to the architect Frank Gehry.

Not that Galliano – who is in rehab and awaiting a verdict on September 8 after standing trial last month – wasn’t far from the minds of guests in the marquee at the rear of the Musee Rodin on the Left Bank.

“I miss John so much,” said Anna Dello Russo, editor-in-chief of Japanese Vogue. “I’m spoiled because I grew up these past 15 years with his phenomenal couture - perfect, impeccable, flawless,” she said, before adding: “The new reality is interesting, too. Some ideas are excellent.”

Gaytten, 51, an Englishman now steering the Dior-owned John Galliano label, took the bow at the end of the show, joined by his first assistant Susanna Venegas.

But Dior chief executive Sidney Toledano told AFP that the celebrated Parisian fashion house - the keystone of French tycoon Bernard Arnault’s global luxury goods empire –was in no hurry to pick a new creative director.

Backstage, Gaytten opted for discretion, saying that working without the flamboyant Galliano “wasn’t so different ... you need to be more self-reliant, but it gives you a little bit more freedom.”

Rather than dip into Dior’s archives (“We’ve done a lot of that recently”), Gaytten drew vision from the heyday of the Palace nightclub as well as Gehry’s curvaceous buildings and the work of graphic artist Jean-Paul Goude.

The result was looks that built upon Dior’s signature belted silhouette, typified by enormous geometric forms, in colours that moved from bright blues and greens to beige with origami-like folds.

Whimsical headwear included shooting stars and crescent moons – and in another break with the past, Dior’s star model, the US high school grad Karlie Kloss, closed rather than opened the show, in a voluminous wedding dress.



Published in The Express Tribune, July 6^th, 2011.