Cruise 2015: Plain sailing from Raf Simons’ Dior

The mirrored set of the Dior Cruise 2015 show, in New York

It’s odd seeing a Dior show in New York. Namely, because it all feels so very Parisian. Actually, it’s not Parisian per se - a word that conjures up images of chi chi little pied-de-poule suits and veiled hats, baguettes, breton stripes, clipped poodles, that ooh-la-la Francophile shtick – but reminiscent of the Dior we see in Paris.

There was the same stripped-back set, this time an expanse of white catwalk and a metallic mirrored backdrop reflecting the scene like an idealised Hudson River. We were watching Cruise, after all. The real Hudson was more Dior grey than mirror, in reality, but even that fitted the identity of the house.

In itself, that idea of “identity” is a very American notion. And very much a notion of Dior in America. A year after opening his Parisian couture maison, Monsieur Dior established a New York branch to create ready-to-wear looks stamped with the Dior identity but specially adapted for the US market. The founder also licensed his name in the states in the early 1950s, for gloves, handbags, hosiery, and lingerie. America helped make Dior’s fortune, and not just in terms of cold hard commerce. Carmel Snow of American Harper’s Bazaar baptised his 1947 line the New Look; the cover of Time magazine catapulting him to the position of fourth most famous man in the world in the same year.

A fitted bodice and scarf-influenced skirt from Dior’s cruise 2015 collection

However, it was also the arena of greatest resistance to the changes he wrought. Dior’s clothing sparked protest, most evidently the founding of the “Little Below The Knee” club, who rallied and raged against his aesthetic. When Dior visited the USA for the first time in September 1947, phalanxes of women met him with placards declaring “Monsieur Dior, We Abhor Dresses To The Floor” as others waltzed in his fairytale ball gowns.

So, choosing New York as the locale for Dior’s Cruise collection – the kick-off for the entire 2015 season, as it happens – was charged. Interestingly, Raf Simons mentioned before the show that he was conscious of the commercial roots to the Cruise collection, the reality to it. But that’s been a motivating factor behind his work at Dior. After getting to grips with the fantasy inherent to Dior’s history – I didn’t call those ball gowns “fairytale” out of laziness – Simons now wants to bring it to the streets.

I could blather about “bubble up” and Yves Saint Laurent’s street-inspired Beat collection. But that didn’t seem to factor into what Simons’ did. He isn’t so much interested in drawing from what women are actually wearing on the streets so much as proposing something new for them. Ironically, given that mirror facade, he doesn’t want to reflect reality, but to create it anew.

There was a new feeling to this Dior: Simons talked of waists beings defined, delineated rather then corseted in the house tradition of the waspie-waisted Bar (Dior licensed lingerie because he knew women needed plenty of it to shape his silhouettes. Savvy).

The main motif was the carré, the silk scarf. Another licensed product – although Monsieur Dior also sketched one-off scarves for his treasured high-profile (and high-spending) haute couture clients: there is one bearing an Impressionistic portrait of Princess Margaret in the collection of Kensington palace. Simons brushed his equivalents with pigment in a similar style, overlaying them like petals into fluttering dresses, or working a fluid drape into floor-grazing columns of crepe. They knotted around wrists and the ankles of shoes. Jackets were cut square, either entirely or at the lapels to fall open slightly.

Those squares also linked back to flags, the memorable inspiration for Simons’ winter 2013 haute couture collection, one section of which was also an ode to the crisp, bandbox chic of America. The American woman was also an idea Simons wanted to express. The cleanliness of line and lack of overt embellishment is something we tag as quintessentially American, so too the ease and practicality, the sportswear feel. More overtly, there was a sense of craft: Simons used macrame, and some of that overlaying of scarf-on-scarf gave a sense of traditional American patchworked comforters. But very chic ones.

A column dress with painted silk drape, from Dior Cruise 2015

Simons himself allied this collection’s fluidity to the Dior Cruise 2014 collection he presented last summer in Monaco, but these felt more like realised garments than the zip-bisected dresses he showed then. They were less weighed down – pun intended – with the cruisey allusions of the season. There was an engaging buoyancy. Sometimes, they formed silhouettes reminiscent of Dior’s past, but animated into constant rippling motion. Airy. Those were the most striking of the outfits Simons showed.

There was also an engagement with the very purpose of Cruise – not the nautique thing that distracts many a designer, although Dior did rebrand a fleet of ferries to chug us from shore to shore – but to sell. Maybe that was practical as much as idealogical: whereas other designers show four collections a year, Simons shows five for Dior, and two under his own label.

Nevertheless, there was an unabashed acknowledgement of the purposes not just of the pre-collection (which figures generally put at comprising 70-85% of design houses’ sales figures), but of clothing in general: to end up on somebody’s back. For all his fantasy, Monsieur Dior knew his clientele. He made the world look new, not just his cabin models. Raf Simons’ most recent Dior collections have shown a similar aim. That’s not to say this collection wasn’t packed with new ideas, but they were presented with an engaging simplicity and directness. Despite the thought, it wasn’t over-wrought.

Tagged in: Christian Dior, Cruise 2015, Raf Simons, Yves Saint Laurent

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Underwear As A Diet Plan? Please.

I like stories with good guys as much as anybody. This is not one of those stories.

Lawsuits up and down the East Coast claim that certain brands of underwear designed to miraculously melt fat do no such thing. The sellers “prey upon women’s insecurities about their body images,” in the words of a Massachusetts suit. In case you missed the point, they are “PISSED,” New York Magazine said of buyers who sued in that state. They have reason to be: whether or not the lingerie companies are lawbreakers, they qualify as vultures. Yet try as I may, I can’t muster pity for customers who swallowed this pipe-dream bait.

The suits target Maidenform Brands and its Flexees Instant Slimmer, along with Wacoal America, which sells the iPant. These products, running $38 and $60, respectively, contain minerals and nutrients that ooze into your body and can vaporize some fat. Or so the companies claimed. While Wacoal declined The Boston Globe’s request for comment about the lawsuits, Maidenform said it had learned its fabric supplier might not be able to substantiate the corporate claims and buyers could request refunds. But the firm defended its Slimmer nonetheless, according to the newspaper.

To steal a phrase, even if the courts say the firms have a right to market their (under)wares this way, that doesn’t mean they are right to do so, any more than payday lenders and telemarketers are right to scavenge off the gullible or financially pinched. Business ethicists I interviewed pointed to a hoary tradition of the beauty industry monetizing women’s societally pressured desperation to look attractive.

You can believe the foregoing and still believe that consumers also have some responsibility. If we were discussing climate change, I’d cite the scientific consensus that it’s real. If the topic were evolution, my start point would be the science undergirding that concept. Well, medical science is similarly unambiguous: aside from a minority of people who are obese due to underlying disease, there’s just one way within our control to lose weight: eat right and exercise regularly. Period. (It’s interesting that many putative liberals look down on deniers of climate and evolution science while demanding empathy for those who reject nutrition science.) People who, in defiance of science, think that they can shop their way to fitness only reinforce the stereotype of Americans as mindless materialists.

I know — I just made “eat right and exercise regularly” sound as easy as breathing, when it’s not. I also interviewed a sociologist who argued (indisputably) that contempt for overweight people is real, and, further, that individuals can’t control their weight, a privilege supposedly restricted to the affluent with their pricey diet and exercise regimens. That’s where she lost me.

First, people who drop up to $60 on a pair of panties probably aren’t on food stamps; their bank accounts simply exceed their IQs. Second, the number of people for whom obesity is but a symptom of underlying disease is small. It is true that more than 80 percent of dieters regain the weight they’ve shed after two years. Read on in that last link, and you’ll see the likely explanation: people try diets that are too restrictive and calorie-deprived. Permit me a personal anecdote here.

Two decades ago, my doctor told me I could stand to lose 10 pounds. (You know you’re in trouble when you’re naked on the exam table and the physician says, “You’re carrying around a little extra, aren’t you?”) I immediately surmised the font of my fat: that massive slice of cake or pint of Ben Jerry’s I wolfed down for dessert every night. Rather than give up dessert — a straitjacket regimen I doubt I could have maintained — I replaced sweets with healthier foods (nuts, cheese, chips and salsa). Call it the Dirty Harry Diet, from an interview years ago in which Clint Eastwood said he stayed lean not by counting calories, but by choosing only healthy food and then eating as much as he wanted. I lost the weight and kept it off.

This is not to deny that emotional triggers — stress, sorrow, etc. — can drive even disciplined people to destructive behaviors, including overeating. But the temporary interruption in a diet from a one-time crisis is not what bedevils those who struggle with their weight. It’s unhealthy “yo-yo” dieting, the serial up-and-down cycle of overeating and weight loss. Against that, there’s only one workable strategy: set realistic diet and exercise goals, and then stick to them.

No amount of apologetics can spin an excuse for the credulous seeking an easy, and expensive, way out. How expensive? Ask the litigants who paid for overpriced underwear, and now must shell out attorneys’ fees.

Related: 

• A History Of ‘Snake Oil Salesmen’
• How Safe And Effective Is Alternative Medicine?

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