December 30, 2014 |
Born as it was from the demands of the wealthy American haute couture clients departing on Caribbean or Mediterranean junkets aboard huge ocean liners during the inter-war years who required easy, breezy dresses when on deck, cruise finds a natural home in New York City. That’s where the majority of designers pitch up to show off their wares, in small-scale showroom sit-ins around the city, part-trunk show, part-salon presentation. Cruise suits New York, because it is a season focused on the art of selling, in a city where fashion is frequently perceived as devoted to the selfsame.
New York is where Raf Simons chose to present his sophomore cruise show for the house of Dior. Which caused many to take umbrage. Why? Because Simons is the anti-Establishment’s sacred cow, a man whose output consistently questions the fashion status quo. Simons showing cruise in New York – commerce meeting commerce in a man whom everyone sees first and foremost as a creative? It’s revolutionary. Which is kind of the point. Besides, the whole idea of Simons heading Dior, however, is perhaps the most anti-Establishment thing he has ever done. “I needed a challenge,” says Simons. “Jil was a niche brand. And I think it wouldn’t have been a challenge to take on another niche brand. It’s not only the style, it’s not only the aesthetic. It’s also how it sits in the fashion world.” And, of course, cruise is now a big, big part of the fashion world, especially at a brand such as Dior. Niche it is not.
For Simons, New York was the natural choice for this sort of thing. “Christian Dior was the first one who brought his things to America,” says Simons, quietly. We’re sitting in the Pierre hotel, a few hours before the Dior cruise show is scheduled to begin. Simons is preternaturally calm, considering. “It’s different to have this going on,” he muses, quietly still. “Normally you won’t see me until show time.” But with cruise, everything is prepared in advance and then shipped out. Final changes are minimal. “We’re showing out of our world,” says Simons – meaning not only the geography of Paris, but Dior’s rarefied Avenue Montaigne ateliers, and his own base in Antwerp, where he creates his acclaimed eponymous menswear.
Nevertheless, in a strange way, America is a world that belongs both to Simons and to Dior himself. As Simons says, Monsieur Christian brought his clothes to America himself – opening a New York branch in 1948, when he made his first trip to the States. “He came and he was extremely successful,” comments Simons. “There was always a very strong connection and dialogue between American women and Dior’s house, which is something I started feeling strongly also after a couple of seasons in my new situation. Which was astonishing to me; it made me very happy because of the fact that that was historically also the case.”
A bound volume, placed in the room of each of Dior’s cruise guests, laid bare the relationship between house and country. It wasn’t always easy – when he made his first trip to the USA, Monsieur Dior was met not only with cheers and adulation but with picket lines. The Little Below the Knee Club, an organisation established in Dallas in 1947 in violent opposition to Dior’s New Look, met his arrival with placards declaring, “Monsieur Dior. We abhor dresses to the floor”. But ultimately, America became a bastion of support for Dior.
And Simons? “I had always been very attracted to America,” he states. “Not only New York. New York is a big part of it, but as much also the West Coast.” Indeed, his winter 2014 own-label show featured a collaboration with the Californian artist Sterling Ruby, as everyone who knows anything about fashion will be able to tell you. There’s also sometimes a sense of disaffected Bible Belt youth, the dystopia behind the American dream, to Simons’s work, inflected as it so often is with teenage urges and longings, materialism, and a throbbing, pulsing undercurrent of music that finds a natural bedfellow in the US.
If Simons’s Dior has been mostly confined to the boulevards of Paris, this season he took it to the streets of America, and onto the body of the American woman. That was motivated, in part, by the idea of exporting Dior once more to the States. “At one point we decided New York [for the cruise show],” reasons Simons. “And then you start to think about the city, and so, in a way. Not that I think it’s necessary – I don’t think it is necessary – to go to a place and have to be inspired by a place, but [New York] turns out to be a place that I find energetic and inspiring. So I wanted a show that brings that kind of energy, that brings that kind of strength, that is very alive. I thought all those things were kind of relevant for me to use as a tool to modernise the brand, to make this at least feel very modern.”
“This is something we did before,” says Sidney Toledano, Dior’s chief executive officer, of the New York cruise show. “We decided the first time to show in New York because US buyers really wanted it, and clients, too. We showed to 200 people and only US press, three times,” he recalls. Now, as the economy recovers and demand begins afresh, he states, “We had to go back to New York. Raf decided to go to Brooklyn for the view of the city. The idea of having the city be part of the show.”
That came across in the venue: Brooklyn’s Navy Yard, with the catwalk elevated several hundred metres to enable the audience to peer through a vast window at the vista of the city. In turn, this was reflected in a mirrored backdrop, undulating like the surface of the East River, and refracting the refractions of all those New York City skyscrapers. “I’m so not going to do ‘flower space’,” said Simons beforehand, “or Dior volume. No. It wouldn’t feel right to me, it would feel too much maybe like what they would hope for maybe, or what they would expect.”
The unexpected has come to characterise Simons’s Dior. While the aesthetic hallmarks of the label are always in place – Simons again and again iterates both in conversation and in collections the importance of the wasp-waisted Dior Bar jacket, while Toledano summarised happily post show that “the message was modernity, and respecting the codes of the house” – the interpretation was, once again, different. If there was something of a city-girl slant to Simons’s winter ready-to-wear, of flocks of females marching purposefully down a street, much as the women of Manhattan tend to, cruise was something lighter, easier. Indeed, more cruisey.
“I started looking a lot at les carres, the silk scarves, which [Monsieur Dior] did a lot,” said Simons. In the 1950s, Dior’s carres weren’t only tourist-trap gift-shop pieces, but gifts for valued (and valuable) clients. Dior’s ateliers hand-painted them with portraits and dedications to the cherished few, dispensing themas cherished gifts. Princess Margaret, a high-profile and controversial client of Dior, was the recipient of one bearing a sketch by a young apprentice named Yves Mathieu-Saint-Laurent. “They were the opposite from what, for example, Hermes does with the scarves,” says Simons. “They are not worked within the square, all mirrored. It’s more rough, it has a very rough, artist kind of feel to it.”
“For me I look at it like a flag. It’s very pop,” says Simons. That notion of course recalls his winter 2013 haute couture, inspired by flags (sort of) and dedicated to couture clients from across the globe, including a bandbox-striped inauguration-worthy section devoted to the Americas. But rather than the formality of couture, here it was translated into an easiness – fluttering, flapping silk, brightly coloured, hand-scrawled. Nothing heavy-handed, or even heavy at all.
“I thought the materialisation was something that was quite new for me,” Simons continues. “This kind of thin, floaty silk. I was also interested by the simplicity of that very geometric shape, which is square. It’s square, you know, it’s a monolith, but it’s a soft thing, it’s a very feminine thing. All these things were for me interesting ingredients. There were a lot of pieces that were constructed with fragments from the geometry of the carre, or sometimes even built almost completely with only carres. There are dresses where there is no pattern, it is only carre pieces. We had to make them small, of course, small carres, and then they’re hand-embroidered to make carres, printed usually, or almost collage-like dresses.”
Re-reading this, and watching the spring/summer 2015 collections begin to unfold, it’s striking how influential Simons’s work has been. I remember seeing Cathy Horyn, then fashion critic for The New York Times, at a Thomas Tait show in London. She remarked how she had seen reflections of Simons’s first Dior cruise show in the collections of numerous other designers. “That one collection has been a goldmine,” she commented. I hadn’t equated Simons’s Dior collage with what other designers have been creating, but there is a correlation between his layered skirts, patched together from dozens of floating silk squares, and the season’s emergent taste for floating panels and asymmetry. What he’s doing is referenced, and frequently directly copied, even at cruise level.
That’s because Raf Simons is full of ideas, full of thoughts. More so, he’s willing to experiment, and to make mistakes – or at least, take wrong turns that may lead on to something new and different. This collection was exploding with ideas, none of which felt second-hand. “For example, there are Bar jackets, all kind of Bar jackets, but there are Bar jackets that are reduced to the female shape, almost like a mannequin in a couture house, which are then covered by silk scarves, so suddenly it’s like a painted body. At the same time, sometimes there are Bar shapes, and the silk scarves are used as they are, to be draped on and then suddenly you have like a fluid skirt,” says Simons, breathlessly, reeling through a litany of the outfits from the collection. “All of these things are going on – I was thinking about how can I deal in the different way in which printing, graphic, flowers, that that sort of thing.”
It’s all the more remarkable to see this breadth of thinking expounded on a cruise collection – traditionally (and even in Simons’s own words) a primarily sales-driven vehicle. I wonder if he gets a kick out of that? After all, Raf Simons (the man and label) has often played with rules and uniforms, the raiments of subcultures, schoolboy garb and the cultish attire of teenage music fanatics. The idea of working within the restrictions of a season for sales rather than flights of fancy perhaps had an appeal for him. “It also needs to have a commercial impact, for myself as well,” says he. “It’s a cruise collection.” But not like one we’ve ever seen before.
Photographer: Sophie Carre
By Alexander Fury
