'Paris has a reliable way of disrupting your notions and at the same time broadening the conversation' cathyhoryn
Photo-Illustration: by The Cut; Photos: Courtesy of Off-White, Saint Laurent, and Dior It took Paris less than 36 hours to overturn Milan’s applecart. For a week now, we’ve been raving about tailoring and the return of the suit — and on Tuesday, Maria Grazia Chiuri turned Dior’s famous Bar jacket inside out and, for extra kicks, teamed up with an Italian innovator that uses airbag technology and transistors to develop gear that protects your body and helps regulate body temperature.
The Bar jacket is something of an architectural wonder. Fitted through the chest and spreading slightly at the waist, it provided the foundation for Dior’s New Look in 1947. All of Chiuri’s predecessors at the house have played with its original form, which included padding to achieve that crisp shape. Essentially, she removed the padding and applied it to the front of one Bar style, adding the feature of airbag technology.
Dior Photo: Courtesy of Dior “The idea is to look to the past but look with a different eye,” Chiuri said. She did that in clever ways — by ripping into key signatures; by creating new, lightweight technical brocades that are pleasingly mellow in hue and as cool as jeans; by offering laces and netting that employ the latest knitting-mill technology; and by including sublimely simple dresses in a blend of wool and silk that reflect the rigor of Dior haute couture.
Saint Laurent Photo: Courtesy of Saint Laurent Sitting at the Saint Laurent show last night, I suddenly felt a chill. And it wasn’t the rare sight of the icy Freja Beha Erichsen on the runway in a sleek black wool coat and ivory chartreuse skirt that caused it. Rather, a long bank of windows overlooking the Trocadéro fountain had silently slid open.