‘Christian Dior – Designer of Dreams’ exhibits at the V&A museum until September 2019, staged in the new subterranean Sainsbury gallery where you feel as if you are exhuming from the fashion archive.
Following on from the Parisian exhibition at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, the retrospective celebrates 70 years of the fashion house. The exhibition opens with the iconic bar suit; a design which established the so-called New Look in the 1950’s and sets the tone for the rest of the exhibition with the quintessential Dior silhouette. It has a black full pleated skirt and cream suit jacket with an impossibly tiny waistline. In fact, one of the main takeaways from this exhibition is the sense of astonishment at the extremely petite waist circumferences and the women who wore them. Christian Dior described designing such silhouettes as “ephemeral architecture”. However, in post-war austerity, the couturier caused outrage. In Chicago 1947, women led protests against Dior designs and the suppression of women’s bodies which is only slightly touched on.
Curated by Oriole Cullen, the setting of the exhibition is incredibly immersive. Cullen has recreated the architecture of a Parisian street façade, just like the one that Dior grew up on. In the ‘historicism’ themed room, the dresses are displayed in an architectural rotunda in a French 18thc countryside scene. In the ‘garden’ themed room, there is a stunning ceiling display of cut out paper flowers which cascade down over your head. These kind of ethereal settings reinforce couture as luxury escapism.
One of the main attractions of the exhibition is Princess Margaret’s 21st birthday dress. Once again, the dress is astonishingly petite. The colour of the dress is a lot warmer with gold details compared to Cecil Beaton’s famous photographs of Margaret in the bright white dress where he bleached out the photograph for what he felt was more regal look. The ‘Dior in Britain’ section was added for the UK V&A exhibition and was an interesting dimension that characterised Christian Dior as an anglophile. Throughout his career, Dior maintained close ties with the royal family dressing them and showing his designs at Blenheim palace and the Savoy Hotel. Dior expressed his adoration for all things British, yet we can expect this characterisation was just as much a business conscious decision.
In celebrating the lifetime of the house, the show encompasses designs from all its creative directors. One of the main successes of this exhibition is its ability to integrate (almost) seamlessly the old and new pieces. Galliano’s work is the exception to this; his pieces stick out significantly with their outlandish designs which stray so far from the typical Dior aesthetic. The show presents a timeline of each creative director’s vision of the house over the last 70 years. John Galliano’s anti-Semitic abuse scandal which saw him being fired from the house is neatly omitted. However, the current director Maria Grazia Chiuri’s pieces are a welcome progression.
There are some aspects of Dior’s vision that are problematic today. For example the ‘travel’ section where bold colour and design is explored to exoticise other cultures and also raises the discussion of cultural appreciation and appropriation. The creative directors have been inspired by Japan, Mexico, India, China and Egypt; however, this isn’t always explored in a tasteful way particularly when Galliano used the prop of a giant head of an ancient Egyptian god on the catwalk which is displayed in this section.
This is the biggest exhibit of Dior in the UK so far; however, the overall exhibition misses the punchiness that you get in the final room of the exhibition. The ‘Dior ballroom’ is by far the pinnacle of the show, where you feel like you could spend a long time watching the room transform. Dresses rotate on platforms that have been worn by celebrities and royalty to mention a few Jennifer Lawrence, Charlize Theron, Rihanna, Taylor Swift, Lupita Nyong’o and Princess Diana. A light and music display lasts for 7 minutes, transforming the ceiling and chandeliers from a sunny day into a night sky covered in shooting stars and a cascade of glitter. This room embodies the fairy-tale opulence of Dior’s imagination.
The 2015 Alexander McQueen exhibition ‘Savage Beauty’ set the tone for the V&A’s fashion exhibitions in terms of scale and theatricality and it is hard to resist the comparison of their curation. However, we must resist this comparison of content between these two antithetical designers. McQueen’s creative genius and dark side inspired exhilaration and repulsion with his designs. It is almost impossible to inspire the same emotional drama. On the other hand, Dior embodies romance, fairy-tale and femininity. The V&A exceeds in its realisation of artistic vision in its evocative settings and the end result is a completely beautiful presentation of the Dior house which exists in its own fantasy.
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