The first photos of Raf Simons’ Spring/Summer 2013 campaign for Dior are already circulating through newsstands and tablets everywhere. In this pure, white setting, little surrealist clouds à la Magritte sprinkle a holy, minimalist, and strangely poetic vibe into the scene.
The Belgian designer’s style is then grafted in: a geometric chic full of discretion and delicateness, as if shooting for the grandiloquence of John Galliano. Breaking up the British tendency of constraining women in a fantasy of another era, Raf Simons seeks rather, like the father of the design house himself, to emphasize the immense sensitivity of the “beautiful creature” that is the woman.
Through the lens of his friend and photographer Willy Vanderperre, living dolls are posed in an androgynous wardrobe, segueing into a world of imagination. All the key pieces are present and accounted for. Black miniskirts in iridescent silk, pastel tops in silk jersey tied up with an enormous bow in the back… “Le smoking”, however, is still the great success story of this premier. While the rules are getting rewritten at Saint-Laurent, here a pants suit with a floral jacket ties in with the Christian-era “tailleur-bar”, a true testimony that things are getting taken back to square one at Dior. That’s not to say that these creations are any less thought-provoking. For, if the new creative director is playing around with the past, it is only to better create in the present. And so a beautiful harmony is born.
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