The Dior Exhibition

Anne here. I spent yesterday morning dazed and wandering vaguely (quite of my own accord) among crowds of other women, also dazed and emitting gasps and oohs and ahhs. And taking photos, lots of photos. Because we weren't allowed to touch. 

I did notice several very elegant men in the crowd, making notes and taking photos, but most of the men I saw were lurking glumly in corners; here a father with an empty pram, there a husband visibly practising patience, on a bench a weary-looking fellow minding a handbag and a coat.

So where was I? At a fashion show — an exhibition celebrating 70 years of Dior fashion, in Melbourne, my home town, at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV). (Click on the photos for a closer view.)

Melbourne (Australia) is one of only three cities in the world that were chosen to help celebrate Dior's 70th anniversary. The other two cities are Paris and New York.

"Why Melbourne?" you may ask. Or even "Why Australia?" Well, unbeknown to most people (me included) the House of Dior has a long history of association with Australia.

Back in July, 1947, The Australian Women’s Weekly, the major women's magazine at the time, in association with the major department stores, ran a "Paris Fashions for All Parade" — 120 hand-picked fully accessorized French couturier outfits and four French models touring department stores around the country. It contained four Christian Dior original outfits from his debut collection in Paris in February that year.

Dior's "New Look" collection had a huge effect on fashion across the western world, revitalizing women's fashion after WW2, putting drab fabrics, rationing, padded shoulders and boxy, military-look outfits firmly in the past.

The "Paris Fashions" tour was such a huge success that the following year, in 1948 the first ever complete Dior collection to be shown outside of Paris — 50 original outfits, fully accessorized — toured Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide (state capital cities).

Speaking to The Sydney Morning Herald at the time, Dior declared that “living in the sunshine of a comparatively new country unscathed by war, Australians have a cleaner, brighter outlook and are more receptive to new ideas than the tired people of European countries”. (Quote from this site.)

As well as the collection, Dior sent a large number of his staff, including seven of his mannequins (as models were called then) to model the clothes. Here they are, arriving in Australia, looking amazingly gorgeous after a gruelling 60 hour flight.

The collection caused such a sensation that The Weekly staged three more French fashion extravaganzas, in 1947, ’48 and ’49. In October 1957 Dior died suddenly, aged 52, of a heart attack, but the following month 83 of his creations were dispatched from Paris, and the Australian parades went on. 

The vision and determination of two women helped foster that connection — Mary Hordern, the glamorous and well connected fashion editor of the Australian Women's Weekly, and Mary Alice Shiell, the fashion buyer for David Jones (a major department store). You can read more about them here and here.

Dior named some of his designs after Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide (state capital cities) and a number were called "Australie" and, according to an article I read on a plane recently (but didn't bring home), every one of Dior's collections since then have had at least one outfit named after some aspect of Australia or one of its cities. That really surprised me.

And thus the Dior Australian connection is explained. 

I'm no fashionista, and dress for comfort rather than style, but I have to say, the display of fabulous clothes (not to mention shoes, and hats and other accessories) blew me away. The designers of the exhibition made clever use of mirrors, as you can see in this photo.

From one of the signs in the exhibition: "With every collection, Christian Dior introduced a new line, silhouette and series of themes, establishing a series of design codes that are now synonymous with the house. Revisited and recalibrated since his death, these codes were critical to Dior's creative vocabulary and have endured as part of the language of the house as expressed by subsequent creative directors. Four codes key to Dior are examined in this room; The New Look, the line, the flower and the eighteenth century." 

Guess which these are?

The exhibition also featured the work of the major designers who came after Dior, working in the House of Dior, right up to the current one, Maria Grazia Chiuri, the first woman to become the head designer for Christian Dior.

There was a giant video running on the back wall, showing a recent fashion parade of Chiuri's clothes as a backdrop to one of the displays. The friend I went with thought these designs were stunning — clothes designed to move with women's bodies. You can get an idea of the video from the photo below.

Such was my state of daze that I took many photos but forgot to note the designers' names, so I hope you can forgive me, and just enjoy the gorgeousness.

  Keep scrolling down . . .

This is a small selection of some of the photos I took.

Yes, I took heaps. 

So, what about you -- have you ever been to a fashion show? Are you even interested in fashion? (If you'd asked me, I'd have said no, but then . . . I was blown away by these.) Do you have a favorite among these dresses?

Comments

[Sonya Heaney]

LOL - At the Diana exhibition at Kensington Palace the husbands were dropping wives off and going to the pub for a few hours!

Back in my ballet days I was a dancer in a fashion show. I felt very... short... It's a very odd scene to be part of.

Dior has maintained its class (they're gorgeous), but some fashion houses have lost their minds recently. Some of the Prada designs in the past year look like they're made for kindergarteners!

[Mary T]

Thank you Anne, for the lovely post and all of the beautiful pictures. I love this sort of thing. I have never been an especially fashionable person myself, but I love looking at it - especially vintage fashions.

[Larisa]

Oh, lovely. This exhibit will be in Denver, Colorado USA in November 2018. Thank you for the preview! It is also cool to see the Outlander season two costume blog of Georgian and Dior style influences.

The Yves Saint Laurent show a few years ago was gorgeous.

[Anne Gracie]

Sonya I was tempted to take a photo of one weary man minding an empty pram, but didn't. We were very impressed with the new Dior collection. I confess, I don't understand some of the more OTT fashions.

[Anne Gracie]

Thanks you, Mary, I enjoyed it much more than I'd expected to. And I have a heap more photos, but ran out of room.

[Anne Gracie]

Larisa, I'm sure you'll enjoy it. I don't think it's exactly the same exhibition -- we were told only 3 cities in the world will have this one -- but I'm sure there will be a number of Dior 70th anniversary exhibitions, and judging by this one, they'll all be amazing.

[Vicki L.]

Personally, fashion for me is what works for gardening, slumpy, dirty work. Or what keeps me warm.

However, I'm totally fascinated by the pictures from fashion week to see what the designers think is wearable...

Love going to museums and seeing the exhibits where there is clothing. High fashion, mid fashion, "low" fashion. The gorgeousness of the high fashion and the durability and the ability to make pretty low fashion through the ages.

How clothing and clothing styles affects attitudes and the ability to do the jobs required of women through the ages.

The number of petticoats, kind of stays/corsets, etc required for high fashion just wasn't going to cut it for a homesteader in a soddy on the Plains in the Western regions of the US...

[Mary M.]

Oh, yes, those were elegant days, even for school girls. I remember the "New Look," which required that hems had to be 13" off the floor no matter how long-legged or short you were. We had a stand-up measuring device to make it easy. You'd rotate in your to-be-hemmed skirt while someone pinned the hem at the correct height. Small waist (thanks, panty girdle), flattering length (mid-calf, check out the photos). Then the chemise dress came in and fashion was never really the same. Now, it seems, anything goes. For me, the girdle disappeared decades ago and all pants, all the time solves the hem problem. Yeah, I think that's a good thing. But we were ritzy back in the day.

[Lillian Marek]

Those 1950s ball gowns with the huge skirts and luxurious fabrics defined glamor for me when I was a kid. Maybe that's at least part of the attraction of the Victorian period.

[Sue McCormick]

I don't care much for fashion in general — and I gravitated immediately to pants for office wear and have never looked back!

But I have a deep affection for the New Look. It appeared just as I was changing my college wardrobe for my Adult "new teacher" look. It felt glamorous and helped my feel adult. (I was only twenty when I became a full-time teacher, so feeling adult was a big help!)

I'll continue to stick with the slacks, but I DO remember Dior and the New Look with love.

[Teresa Broderick]

I have no interest in fashion at all and like you wear clothes for comfort. I'll be passing this post on to my daughter though who is studying fashion design at the moment and has to create a collection for a fashion show at the end of her academic year. She'll be thrilled with the pictures here. Even I have to admit they're gorgeous and one of two caught my eye.

[Annette Naish]

When I was young, and had no chest, I loved fashion. My mother worked at Nieman Marcus and I got some excellent deals. Clothes were fun and I liked finding lovely things to wear. I bargain shopped and got terrific clothes on the cheap.

I worked in a downtown office in Dallas and it was expected that we all looked well dressed. There were never slacks in the office. Yes, I know, that was a zillion years ago, but it was the rule.

I like Dior, because I get the impression they want women to look lovely. The New Look made a woman look graceful. The ball gowns were glamorous as were most everything in the original collection.

Alas, I am no longer built to wear fashion.

Anne, the pictures and reminders are absolute treasures. I now am more into comfy and wearable. I have had many phases in my life. I went through the fashion period. Then we lived in the country and I went through the durable period. I worked disasters for FEMA and stayed with durable for quite a time.

I have sort of stayed with that.

Not a fashionable piece in sight.

But, I loved this journey into fashion and I thank you.

[Anne Gracie]

Vicki, I'm with you — fashion to me is something to look at, and I loved looking at all these fabulous clothes that I would never wear.

I often think of the colonial women here, too, living out in the bush in their long, layered clothes and heavy skirts, while the men worked in pants and a singlet. They were pretty amazing, those ancestresses of ours.

[Anne Gracie]

Mary, those memories are priceless — I love the sound of that hem measuring device. I can remember standing on a chair slowly rotating as my mother or a friend pinned the hems of our home-made clothes — or our school uniforms.

As for the waist, apparently those early Dior models had to have an 18 inch waist. There was a story about one Australian model who, though very successful, had to exercise (and presumably starve herself) for weeks in order to qualify to wear Dior on the catwalk.

The chemise dresses seemed strangely drab to me, among all the other displays, but I suppose they were something very different, and that's often what fashion is about, isn't it?

[Anne Gracie]

Yes, there's something quite exciting about all those layers of swishy fabric swirling around your hips — you still see it when little girls get dressed up in a swishy foamy-skirted party dress and gleefully twirl around as they go swish-swish-swish. I think there's a little girl in all of us that responds to that kind of thing. I was a terrible tomboy, but I still had a party dress that made me twirl and swish and I loved it.

And all those waves of sumptuous fabric are very glamorous. Though the girdles and bustles of the Victorian era don't appeal to me at all. I think my favorite period in fashion is just before WW1 -- and the designs of Paul Poiret, which seem to me to be quite modern, and very wearable, as well as lovely.

[Anne Gracie]

Lovely, Sue — thanks for sharing your memory of the New Look coming in. I went searching for the fashions just before the New Look, and they were indeed drab and practical and not at all exciting. The one I included on the blog was at least looking fashionable, though IMO still drab and dull. But I shared one pic on Facebook that was entitled "Summer Frocks June 1946" and showed women in what I would hardly call a frock, let alone anything summery -- more like something you might wear on a safari, or working on the farm. It, more than anything, gave me an inkling of why people responded so positively to The New Look — and now your comment has added to my understanding.

[Anne Gracie]

Teresa, there were so many fashion students at the exhibition, making notes and having intense discussions. There were also big screens showing the making of some things, and the intricacy of some designs. A very smart red coat, for instance, took 180 man-hours to make. And the finishes and tiny details were marvelous.

[Anne Gracie]

Thanks, Annette -- I'm glad you enjoyed the pics. I wish I had more space to include the many others I took. I really did go snap-happy, there was so much gorgeousness.

I think a lot of workplaces still have the rule of no pants for women. And here, where the kids all wear school uniforms, a lot of them still have the girls wearing skirts and dresses, which I think is impractical and unfair. I went out with an old schoolfriend the other day and it was very windy, and we recalled how when we were at school it was a constant fight to keep our skirts from blowing up in the wind.

Thank goodness for pants, I say. And yes to dressing for comfort, but I don't see why we can't have gorgeous clothes that are practical and comfortable and designed for larger-than-stick-insect figures. *g*

[Joanne Bourne]

Those are just lovely outfits. *sigh* Not practical for the way I live and I'm never going to go anywhere I could wear such things ... but they are most beautiful

The fabric alone must be a pleasure to handle.

[Karin]

I love the New Look. For women with bigger hips and thighs, those full skirts hide a multitude of sins. I still like a shirtwaist dress, or long broomstick skirt, as they call them now. I absolutely love that ballgown partway down the page, the one with the black underskirt, white lace over it, and sort of black scarf across the collarbones. It's stunning!

[Anne Gracie]

Joanne, people were simply itching to reach out and feel the fabric and more than once I heard them wish they could. I know when I went to the Dressmaker (movie) costume exhibition last year there was a sign at the door saying don't touch, but people were -- they couldn't resist. But they were clothes made for a movie -- fabulous clothes, but not Dior -- so they gave in to temptation.

[Anne Gracie]

Karin that black and white ballgown with the lace was one of my faves, too — I kept trying for the perfect photo, but it was on a revolving stage, and whenever I was able to get a good view, there were people in front of me.

[Mary M.]

Anne, I had a chemise dress that was quite slinky. My father made a comment about the dress not indicating what was underneath (curves) and I responded, the more fun to find out (with my boyfriend standing nearby). Surprised I got away with that comment. Actually, surprised I even made it!

[Anne Gracie]

LOL Mary, you cheeky possum (Australian saying -- our possums are small and cute)

[Binnie Syril Braunstein]

Anne -

What gorgeous pics of that fabulous exhibition! I especially loved that deep rose gown with the view from he back - I think it must have been a ball gown. And that eye-popping full-skirted asymmetrical number with the metallic looking collar around the neck. I could envision some daring actress wearing it to the Met (Metropolitan Museum of Art) Gala. And I, too, would have have itched to touch those gorgeous fabrics. Sigh...And thanks so much for sharing not only the pics, but also the fascinating history of the connection between Australia and the House of Dior.

[Anne Gracie]

Thanks you, Binnie. It was a lovely experience. The exhibition will be in New York, I believe, so maybe you'll be able to whizz up and see it for yourself.