What I don't know about fashion needs more than one documentary, but Dior and I, by Frédéric Tcheng, fills in some of that empty space.
Tcheng organizes the movie around the story of Raf Simons. At the start, in 2012, Raf becomes the new creative director at the house of Dior and in just eight weeks faces his first haute couture show. Before this, Raf was in the lesser fashion field of menswear, so his move up at Dior was a big deal for both Raf and the Dior company.
The story goes back to when Christian Dior himself started the business in the 1940s, right after World War II, and immediately orchestrated a major shift in fashion for women. Dior discarded the boxy military look of the wartime period in favor of a rounded feminine style with tiny waists and full skirts, and he followed his early success with a career as a fashion leader so powerful that even those who know nothing about fashion – like me – know that Dior's fashion house is still a big deal.
Like many people, I was educated by the scene in The Devil Wears Prada where Stanley Tucci scolds Anne Hathaway for her ignorant reverse snobbery about the world of fashion. He instructs her that whether she knows it or not, her own smug downscale way of dressing herself is created in the great fashion houses. That's where even the styles we consider separate from frivolous high fashion are created, and where even the colors of the sweaters on the shelves of average stores are determined. Somehow, all of the stuff that ordinary people wear comes from that world of hyper-skinny young women walking that bizarre model's walk along a runway in Paris or New York.
When Raf is introduced as the new creative director of Dior, he's entering a place dominated by the achievement of Christian Dior and the still-powerful presence of a man who died 58 years ago. The title of the movie comes from Christian Dior's memoir where Dior talks about the gap between his sense of himself personally and the public figure he became, which is something like the situation that Raf faces – Raf must work simultaneously as his own person and also as the keeper of a long, esteemed tradition.
You can sense those complications in the look of the actual Dior establishment. It's called an atelier, a space where art is made, but the house of Dior is also a kind of factory and it looks at times like a hospital. Workers wear knee-length lab coats, crisp and white with the name Dior stitched like a name tag above the heart – as if they're doctors or maybe mechanics. There are departments with hierarchies of tasks and authority. All of these people are tremendously skilled at drawing, choosing and handling materials, sewing and constructing.
The film appreciates the remarkable levels of skill and artistry, but it's full of ambiguities. Raf may be a terrific artist, but it's not clear that he's a good leader. He seems stiff and disconnected at times. The world of Dior looks volatile and perpetually unstable, although that's part of making art. Raf has to navigate his way through the present as well as the history and culture of the institution created by Christian Dior, and it's all embodied in a staff of actual human beings.
You can see the richness of the situation in the place Raf chooses for the show. He takes over a stately old mansion in Paris, with a grand staircase and high ceilings, and construction so massive, the place will probably stand for centuries. He then has the walls covered completely in flowers, so the solid continuity of the past is complemented by the fragile immediacy of color. I find it bizarre and wasteful, but that's the conundrum of high fashion and Christian Dior, and some questions of Dior and I.
Does beauty alone justify such excess? And, is it excess?
