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What the Critics Said and What They Really Meant About Dior Couture

Yes, Galliano, we are at your mercy.Photo: imaxtree


Fashion has two Christmases, you know — those heavenly days on which John Galliano shows his spring and fall couture collections for Christian Dior. And yesterday was our summertime Christmas, as Galliano sent another amazing couture collection down the runway. While we’re too busy drooling over the clothes to form coherent sentences about them, the fashion critics certainly cooked up lots of flowery prose. We’ve gathered their remarks below and translated them into normal English.




WWD:

Hadley Freeman in The Guardian:

See it?Photo: imaxtree, Getty Images


Hilary Alexander in the Telegraph:

Suzy Menkes for the International Herald Tribune:

The feline-faced models with arched eyebrows and succulent, shiny lips were so much in the spirit of Carla Bruni Sarkozy that you half expected her to appear at the finale in the vista of a pillared garden. And the approach that the designer John Galliano has taken in dressing the wife of the French president was the soul of this autumn-winter show: incisive cutting on clothes molded to the body, with a subterranean sexual charge. Or, in the case of this runway, with a sensual shadow of a leg visible through a semi-sheer skirt.

Sarah Mower for Style.com:

The templates were all there: big coats, wasp waists, nipped jackets, circle skirts, tulle dance dresses, architectural gowns cut from spiraling lace and jutting scrolls of crin. Mostly framed in black and white, with tints of gray, caramel, Parma violet, mint, and chartreuse to follow, the shapes traced familiar silhouettes—albeit a familiarity shot through with Galliano’s irrepressible touches of perversity.

Fall 08 Paris Couture: Christian Dior Slideshow

What the Critics Said and What They Really Meant About Dior Couture