Behind the spectacle

Passionate fashion fans with well-stocked libraries probably have quite a few volumes on Christian Dior on their shelves. Readers can indeed choose among a wide range of Dior titles, from books about his personal life to volumes about his career or focusing on specific periods of his life.

All these volumes are unique as they chronicle, each in its own way, the history and developments of a maison that radically revolutionised fashion and style.

From the end of the Second World War on, Dior’s fashion house captured a new life, energy and dynamism, injecting a chic optimism into the world of fashion and, above all, into women’s life.

In more recent years, John Galliano reinterpreted the style and message of Christian Dior, creating original designs and showcasing them in phantasmagorical settings, giving back to fashion an important power, that of making people, and women in particular, dream.

It is therefore perfectly understandable why iconic photographer Roxanne Lowit became fascinated with Galliano’s designs for Dior and chronicled through her lenses his passion, inspirations and the revolutionising process he brought at the French maison. Lowit’s work is now collected in a must-have book for Dior’s fans, Backstage Dior (teNeues).

Galliano’s first couture show for Dior was staged in a showroom recreated inside Paris’ Grand Hotel, further shows followed in sport stadiums turned into forests, at the Paris Opéra transformed into a garden, or at the Carousel du Louvre turned for the occasion into a Manhattan rooftop scene. Yet, in every occasion and throughout every season, Galliano managed to seduce his audiences, turning the real space into visions born out of fantasy.

Lowit takes Dior’s fans right behind the scenes of these visions as she captures secret moments – shots of high heels, close ups of models’ makeup, Galliano adding his final touch to an opulent dress and models chatting, misbehaving or looking ethereally beautiful – from the most grandiose fashion shows.

The volume is a wonderful collection of images, colourful, passionate, elegant, glamorous and even irreverent, and there is definitely enough in these pages to make Dior’s fans - and possibly also stylist wannabes - deliriously happy.

Yet Backstage Dior is not only about photographs: the book also features a foreword by legendary fashion journalist Suzy Menkes and essays by Simon Doonan, Barneys’ creative director, and Dr Valerie Steele, director and chief curator of The Museum at Fashion Institute of Technology.

“I have always seen my profession as a kind of struggle against all that is mediocre and depressing about our age,” Dior once declared. You can bet the French designer symbol of elegance, beauty and dream, would have really loved Lowit’s style and such an enthralling book.

Member of the Boxxet Network of Blogs, Videos and Photos Member of the Boxxet Network of Blogs, Videos and Photos Add to Technorati Favorites Lijit Search