The new year has its first new muse: “Punk Alice”. At Dior’s haute couture show in Paris, Lewis Carroll’s feisty heroine got a 21st-century makeover. Imagine Alice, she of Wonderland fame, but in her Charli xcx-inspired Brat era and with a wardrobe handmade by the finest seamstresses in Paris. There you start to get the picture.
A snowy white cross-backed lace pinafore dress was worn with a quivering black silk mohican headdress. Alice’s striped stockings were reimagined as lace-up leather gladiator boots. Her frothy skirt became a birdcage crinoline, her girlish ribbons were knotted dog collar-tight at the throat. In the front row, Pamela Anderson smiled beneath a dotted black veil and Venus Williams was resplendent in tightly coiled braids. A fantastical landscape featuring lions in feather headdresses and plants that sprouted eyes as well as blooms was embroidered all over the walls, a stage set in the garden of the Musée Rodin.
