Gehaje Gallery: Christian Dior Fall 2010 Haute Couture

Saturday, July 10, 2010

Christian Dior Fall 2010 Haute Couture

The Christian Dior Fall 2010 Couture collection was a veritable bouquet of creativity. The show recalled the ‘Tulip line’ designed by Christian Dior in 1953. The flower show was fantastic. John Galliano transformed his models into walking tulips, tigerlillies and orchids. The colors for the collection were vibrant and captivating, featuring the whole color spectrum from cherry red to pale violet.

From Vogue Daily:
There was nothing wintry about Dior’s couture collection for fall—it was a vivid bouquet of flowers in full bloom, tied up in the middle with florists’ raffia bows and topped off with cellophane wrappers as headpieces. “La Ligne Florale” was John Galliano’s name for a collection that started when he gathered together images of Dior’s 1953 Tulip Line, period couture photographs by Irving Penn and Nick Knight’s book of flora, and then let his imagination off into painterly, free-form flight.

Stalking through the hot-house of a tent in the garden of the Musee Rodin, with their hair done up in the shape of bulbs and slashes of bold colour over their eyes, Galliano’s flower-girls were anything but a bunch of chi-chi, shrinking violets. Instead, he’d taken a bolder route, inspired by the strong saturated color and rude vigor of the forms of parrot-tulips, dahlias, irises, pansies, carnations, wisteria—and at one point, even fungi. The bouncing, fluttering petalled skirts, whooshes of tulle and the dainty suede shoes with calyx-form fronds gave the whole thing a new energy and movement. “I wanted it to have poetic abstraction and spontaneity,” he said—and that came across in a liberating lightness of touch executed with a brilliant flair for fabulously-chosen color-clashes. To be sure, amongst the nipped-waist jackets and multi-layered ballgown silhouettes, there was no doubting this was the work of the house of Dior, but this was a season where Galliano shrugged off the weight of too much cumbersome historicism, and that looked great.