Diary
Dior Haute Couture Fall-Winter 2014-15
Talent of Raf Simons blossoms with every season as an orchid, which covered the walls of the white tent in Rodin Museum’s park. “…eight-and-forty six-in-hands, among them the two wonderful carriages already described were driven slowly through the flower-bestrewn streets to the Hofburg; the new uniforms and liveries of the hundred and seventeen bodyguards and lackeys had cost a hundred and seventeen thousand ducats…”
This was the way the envoy Durfort – the matchmaker of a dauphin of France – went to Vienna for the 14-year-old bride Marie Antoinette. Today Archduchess-girl would have wondered what couturier Simons used instead of hoops for the first group of dresses with volume skirts-panier, but all other historical borrowing does not cause issues – only a great admiration for brilliant contemporary reading of a historical material. I am particularly delighted with split hems of small skirts, imitating the termination of a corset of the XVIII century beauty which the poor girl wore since three years old, and gold embroidery camisoles, which would have decorated the hall where Marie Antoinette’s transfer by the best man of the house Habsburg to the suite of the house of Bourbon had to come true…
“… a cunning man among them hit upon the Solomonic expedient of choosing for this purpose one of the uninhabited sandbanks in the Rhine, between France and Germany, in no-man’s land. Here was to be erected a wooden pavilion for the ceremonial transference – a miracle of neutrality. There were to be two anterooms looking towards the right bank of the Rhine, through which Marie Antoinette would pass as Archduchess; and two anterooms looking towards the left bank of the Rhine, which she would traverse as Dauphiness of France after the ceremony. Between them would be the great hall in which the Archduchess would be definitively metamorphosed into the heiress of the throne of France.
…not only had it been decreed that none of the members of her Austrian train were to accompany her across the invisible frontier-line, but the sometime Archduchess was, on entering France, to have discarded every stich of her native attire was not to wear so much as shoes or stockings or shift that had been made by Viennese artificers. From the moment when she became Dauphiness of France, all her wrappings and trappings were to of French origin. In the Austrian antechamber, therefore, in the presence of her Austrian followers, this girl of fourteen had to strip to the buff. Naked as on the day she was born, the still undeveloped girl disclosed her slender body in the curtained chamber. Then she was quickly re-dressed in a chemise of French silk, petticoats from Paris, stockings from Lyons, shoes made by shoemaker to the French court, French lace. Nothing was she to keep that might be endeared to her by memory, not a ring, not a cross…”
Modern Marie Antoinette would be unlikely to cry about it, seeing the collection of Raf Simons for Dior, notable with chords of jumpsuits inspired by the astronauts of the future, and group of the refined elegant redingotes reminding of past military…
I am interested what the handsome Killian Hennessey was doing on this remarkable show in the third row, right behind Anna Wintour? Does it mean that any next perfume novelty will be entrusted to a young talent, the offspring of the cult cognac house? Note: quotes belong to Stefan Zweig “Marie Antoinette. The Portrait of an Average Woman”
Photo (с) style.com
Video (c) dior.com
