Paris Fashion Week: Messiness is Your Dior

Nineteen sixty-one was a pretty good year. It may have been the last year we truly had something to be optimistic about, up until the Bay of Pigs proved that nothing was perfect, not even "plausible deniability." That's the year we elected Jack Kennedy to the White House, and remember how good that felt? Out with fuddy-duddy Ike and Mamie and in with Jack and Jackie; Jackie in particular. Old Joe may have poured millions into that campaign, but in the end it all came down to glamour. Glamour, in case you hadn't realized it, always prevails.

Camelot, they called it. A White House couched in terms of a mythical court and with the better half of it outfitted by Oleg Cassini.

Cassini understood something: Style is a remedy for whatever ails you. Socially, we were a provincial, potluck nation still dining out on tuna casserole. We were not chic. In certain quarters, we might have even been a bit of an embarrassment. You couldn't compete globally while dressing locally. That was the genius of Cassini, a European whose mother had been the darling of the D. C. social set during the McKinley and Roosevelt administrations and a dress designer subsequently.

Well-articulated elegance and simplicity became the key design components of Jackie's state wardrobe, and as a result that wardrobe became a polity unto itself. The First Lady prided herself on her French-Catholic lineage; she pronounced her name in the French manner. Much of what Cassini designed for Jackie might be termed borrowings, as one borrows words from mother tongues or recipes for sole à la Meunière from Larousse Gastronomique. Heavily influenced by master French couturier Hubert de Givenchy, Jackie's wardrobe was a sensation. The Frenchification of the United States was under way.

That Frenchification was returned to Paris by way of John Galliano's anti-anomic Dior Fall 2008 ready-to-wear collection. Anomie is today's hottest ticket. It's what happens when society goes to hell in a handbasket due to corruption of its principles. Designers, especially younger ones, do whole idealistic collections around this theme. They try to darn together what we are so desperate to rip apart, and when they can't they build clothing for new empires that will themselves eventually strike back.

Galliano's wayback machine backs up from a time when we want more out of life to a time when we just about had it (or so beer and cigarette advertisements claimed), and in doing so he has penetrated our conscious with clothing that appears to have been designed exclusively for us. This is not pigeon-toed perimeter apparel in the face of all that hipness. The new Fall collection is equal parts fond concept and crackerjack modern execution.

Bohan-era Dior may have been the professed jumping-off point, but it wasn't a parasitic one. Time-wise, the collection was a slideshow of the years 1961 through 1965 (that is, before the hippies and women's libbers turned this look into the uncoolest totem in town). Into this literal overlay of boxy, Cassini-like insights went with-it, Mod Manhattan, the Twist, and Nancy Sinatra. And there was limelight and maribou and an evening gown whose bouffant skirt was shaped just like rose hips.

It was beautiful, and what can you do with beauty but mar it?

Remember that perfection is dullness. Injury makes for distinction everywhere but on the wings of butterflies. Thus, Galliano made sure his models walked with crudely corrupted hair and makeup that were parodies of Yardley advertisements and a coiffure that was much harder to maintain than it looked. Ask your mother.

Beauty is messiness. Messiness is Your Dior. So is mimesis, in a way that just made the American legacy collections look arthritic.

Images: Style.com