Dior Fall Winter 2015/16

While the 1970s has made a big comeback on the catwalk in recent times, Raf Simons’s Christian Dior Spring/Summer 2015 Haute Couture show presented this Monday in Paris provided a midcentury mélange channeling the 1950s, 60s and 70s, with touches of futurism thrown in for good measure. “I was always thinking of the future for so many years,” claimed the designer explaining the inspiration for his collection “and I was always anti-romanticizing the past, but the past can be beautiful too.” The show took its title from David Bowie’s song Moonage Daydream referencing one of pop music’s most enduring shape-shifters.

Set in a mirrored space ship that looked as if it had landed in the middle of the Rodin museum in central Paris, Simons managed to pull off retro-futurism without resorting to any tired clichés, while respecting the established codes of the house, such as its floral femininity (Simons references ‘les femmes fleur’) and the midcentury hourglass silhouette. Beyond Simons’ stylistic time-travel, which has always been one of his trademark signatures as a designer, his collections for Dior also manage to balance an improbable mix of fabrics and textures, like the use of guipure lace on dresses embroidered with sequins, combined with gilets, opera coats and photo-printed plastic raincoats. Despite the appearance of some rather outlandish psychedelic bodysuits, the Moonage Daydream collection once again demonstrated the designer’s gift for transforming the decorative into the architecturally structured. Silvano Mendes