“New York has become almost as familiar to me as Paris”, wrote Christian Dior in 1957 in his autobiography “Christian Dior & Moi”. The couturier did indeed have a long standing relationship with the United States. Today, in the hands of Maria Grazia Chiuri, the New Look that made Dior famous on the other side...
‘The Modernity of Antiquity’ is what Karl Lagerfeld entitled Chanel’s Cruise 2018 collection. Composed like a return to origins, supple drapings and the elegance of fluid lines caressed silhouettes of tweed and jersey, linen and silk, all imagined by the Kaiser. “The beauty standards of Archaic and Classical Greece are still valid. There never were more...
Luxury brands are unequalled when it comes to vivifying the spirit of Christmas. This year, Dior is surprising us by creating an Advent calendar for the very first time. It goes without saying that this calendar is absolutely chic. The brand on 30 Avenue Montaigne entrusted an illustration studio founded by Anne-Charlotte Laurans with the creation of...
Architecture always had an important place within Pierre Balmain’s creativity – as a young man, the couturier studied architecture while creating fashion drawings on the side. These two disciplines would soon feed off one another, and when Balmain founded his eponymous brand in 1945, it yielded a new fashion with structured lines and a curved...
It was a lightning strike, an illumination, a revelation – an inspiration. Valentino Garavani was literally dazzled. “I had one of the biggest shocks of my life in Barcelona: as a student I was invited to the Barcelona Opera and, enthralled, I saw a woman with grey hair in one of the boxes, very beautiful,...
Karl Lagerfeld once more magnified the glass dome of the Grand Palais in Paris. This time, Chanel rebuilt the Gorges du Verdon to an almost life-size scale. This rocky watery decor celebrates the famous waterfalls in the south of France. On the runway, this was translated by a meeting of water elements and the couturier’s legendary tweed....
At the heart of the Opéra Garnier, at the center of the opulence of a past France, Olivier Rousteing brought his own exaggeration of the Balmain look down the runway. On a catwalk surrounded by the fastidious gold decor imagined by Charles Garnier for Napoleon Bonaparte, the Balmain Army put away their more ferocious pieces...
The fashion imagined for so many years by Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé is chock full of iconic pieces. If there’s one thing that never ceased to inspire this great brand, it’s Paris and the Eiffel Tower. For his second runway at the head of Saint Laurent, Italian designer Anthony Vaccarello set up the...
The Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea looked like the seaside last week. For their runway, Tod’s brought the scent of days past onto the airy mountainous slopes of the Italian peninsula. Diego Della Valle understands this Italy as being venerated and enchanted, just like the filmmakers and actors that have ceded to its grandeur. The beauties on...
The renowned lover of all things elegant released his very first collection in February 1947, during which time France was still clearing the ashes of World War II. The time had come to put the role of women soldiers/ factory-workers on the shelf; to accomplish this, Dior put his faith in the superimposition of different...
