In 1967, Dior was the first Paris haute couture house to embrace the racy new idea, dreamed up the previous year by the whippersnapper Yves Saint Laurent, of “ready to wear” designer fashion. Marc Bohan, then the designer of Dior, correctly judged that the generation of women coming of age in the 1960s were of a different mindset from their mothers. He dispatched with individual fittings and the traditional three-month wait, and gave this new generation boutiques – named Miss Dior – where fashion could be bought off-the-peg.
The Dior show that opened this year’s Paris fashion week, staged in a white box the size of a provincial airport installed in the Tuileries Gardens, was a homage to the modernising instincts of Bohan, designer of Dior for 28 years, who died last year at the age of 97. The current creative director, Maria Grazia Chiuri, has instincts that tend to veer left-of-centre, and it is the lesser known Bohan, rather than the famed Christian Dior, who she feels a synergy with in the Dior archives.
