“Dior: From Paris to the World” Opens at the Dallas Museum of Art

“To reach Dallas, Texas, I had to cross the ocean and enter the New World,” wrote Christian Dior, remembering his first visit. He had been bidden by the visionary merchant Stanley Marcus as one of the recipients of the 10th annual Neiman Marcus Award “for distinguished service in the field of fashion,” alongside master Italian shoemaker Salvatore Ferragamo; the British royal dressmaker Norman Hartnell; and Irene, the great Hollywood costume designer who had recently turned to fashion as well. Dior’s citation described him as “master of the moment in the ranks of the French couture.” It was the fall of 1947. In less than a year, Dior—who had once run a modish art gallery showcasing the work of the Surrealists, among others—had become staggeringly famous.

When his father’s chemical fertilizer business collapsed in the aftermath of the great crash of 1929, Dior had begun selling fashion illustrations to the newspapers and, eventually, his original designs to fashionable milliners and couturiers. He subsequently worked in-house with the designers Robert Piguet and Lucien Lelong, and unveiled his eponymous debut collection for Spring 1947 in February of that year. His Ligne Corolle, which emphasized a soft shoulder, plump bosom, tiny waist, and rounded hips, after the hard-shouldered silhouette of the war years, was immediately dubbed the “New Look” by Carmel Snow, the powerful editor of Harper’s Bazaar, who was soon a great friend and admirer of the designer.

“I saw Christian Dior the day before he left,” Snow wrote to Stanley Marcus on August 30 of that year, “and I can tell you that he was going to America, looking forward to the thrill of his life, which of course, he will get with you looking after him. He is a great man and we are having a lot of his things in the magazine.”

Dior’s historic relationship to the city of Dallas is one reason the Dallas Museum of Art is showcasing the exhibition “Dior: From Paris to the World” (through September 1; the exhibition was originally conceived for the Denver Art Museum by curator Florence Müller, and was adapted for Dallas in collaboration with the museum’s decorative arts curator, Sarah Schleuning).

It tells the story not only of Christian Dior—who died of a heart attack 10 years after opening his house—but of the six other creative directors who have brought their very different visions to the house through the decades since then: Dior’s dauphin, Yves Saint Laurent, who inherited the master’s mantle at the tender age of 21 and briefly brought a whisper of Sixties Youthquake to the house before he was replaced with Marc Bohan, whose elegant, understated clothes pleased conservative clients for decades—until he in turn was replaced by Gianfranco Ferré. Ferre’s richly impasto, bravura clothes made way for John Galliano’s fecund imagination, antic London spirit, and runway fireworks; following that, Raf Simons brought Belgian asceticism and modernity to Dior before Maria Grazia Chiuri introduced her own brand of modern cool and focused on feminism as well as femininity.

A look from Dior’s Spring 2017 Haute Couture collection

Photo: Nick Glover

The Dallas exhibition has echoes of the blockbuster Musée des Arts Décoratifs show—currently being given a British twist at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum—and explores the craft of couture with a spectral display of the toiles that serve as life-size 3-D models for the final garments. It also explores the enduring themes established by Christian Dior himself: the romance of the 18th century; the flowers that he first loved in the gardens of Les Rhumbs; the pink villa in Granville in Normandy, which was his childhood family home and is now a dedicated Dior museum; the power of color; and the excitement and exoticism of travel. This last section, showcased in the museum’s epic, cathedral-like Barrel Vault gallery, has been conceived by the exhibition’s architect, Shohei Shigematsu of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, as a thoroughfare that seems to turn the visitor into a runway mannequin, with the clothes—arranged on tiered platforms on either side—as the audience. The effect is arresting (even if the garments on the upper levels are difficult to see).

Many of the pieces are juxtaposed with works of art from the museum’s collection, along with some strategic loans—who would ever have thought to see a brace of splash-print Marc Bohan Dior gowns from the 1980s next to a Jackson Pollock, or a bevy of shimmering floral print taffeta dresses in dialogue with a Monet and a Georgia O’Keeffe? Or decades’ worth of 18th-century-inspired gowns set before the magnificently scaled The Abduction of Europa, painted in 1750 by Jean-Baptiste Marie Pierre—or Raf Simons’s Fall 2012 Haute Couture dresses, made from fabrics designed with artist Sterling Ruby, next to a Sterling Ruby painting from a prominent local collector?

Installing the “Pollock” dress from Mark Bohan’s Fall 1986 Haute Couture collection

Photo: Nick Glover

Ephemera, such as the correspondence between Snow and Marcus, tells the story of Dior in Dallas, and includes the program from Dior’s Fall 1954 “H Line” collection, when the Dior cavalcade traveled around South America, stopping off at most of the principal capitals to show the current collection to deep-pocketed clients in each city. Although unimaginable in 2019, there was once a dedicated Dior haute couture outpost in Caracas—though Neiman Marcus in Dallas was the only American venue.

Maria Grazia Chiuri and I followed Christian Dior’s route from the Old World to the New when we both left Venice and the wonders of the Dior Ball for Venetian Heritage at the legendary Palazzo Labia for sun-kissed Dallas and the inauguration of the Dior exhibition. I arrived in the nick of time for a Dior lunch in the atrium of the Dallas Museum of Art, where I was hosted by the fabled art collector, philanthropist, and epic fundraiser Cindy Rachofsky. (We were entertained with an onstage conversation between the chic curator Florence Müller and hat maestro Stephen Jones, responsible for so many of the wondrous headdresses in the exhibition.)

I was thrilled to see several of my own loans in the exhibition, including three pieces in the section introducing the work of Christian Dior himself, among them the ballgown “Oceanie” from Fall/Winter 1950, which I discovered—unlabeled—at a Paris auction, recognizing the embroidery as the work of the great house of Rébé and knowing it to be an haute couture piece from a significant house. Imagine my excitement when, years later, Dior’s master archivist Soizic Pfaff and her team tracked down Dior’s original sketch for it—with the exact same fabric swatches still attached.

Then the pied piper Nancy C. Rogers—who, with her husband, Richard R. Rogers, is a principal presenter of the exhibition and its festivities—gathered up a fun group of Dior-clad Dallas glamazons for afternoon drinks at Park House, the recently opened and highly stylish private club.

The following day, I had lunch with Maria Grazia and some of the local Dior gang at the Mirador at Forty-Five Ten, after which we set off for some vintage sleuthing in town before heading to our respective hotels to get ready for the exhibition’s gala opening at the museum and another opportunity to explore eight decades of fashion imagination in detail.

Thence back to the atrium for a dinner (Dallas and Paris combined, with lobster tail, beef tenderloin, and hazelnut mousse) served at glossy, black-topped banquet tables set with orchids and miniature paper-doll costumes representing Dior’s iconic, wasp-waisted “Bar” suit from that debut collection for Spring 1947.

I was delighted to sit with the ever-glamorous Nancy Rogers and her mesmerizing, very deep blue sapphire, and the wildly amusing Kat Graham, and across from the delightful Zoey Deutch and her mother, Lea Thompson—everyone, naturally, clad in their prettiest Diors.