Fashion : Ferre: Dior’s New Man Unfazed by Fashion Flap
In the world of fashion, there is no hotter subject right now than Gianfranco Ferre’s first collection for the House of Christian Dior. To some, the appointment of the 44-year-old Italian designer as artistic director of the best-known name in French fashion borders on sacrilege.
“I don’t think opening the doors to a foreigner--and an Italian--is respecting the spirit of creativity in France,” says Pierre Berge, chairman of Yves Saint Laurent and president of the Chambre Syndicale, the governing body of French fashion.
To others, Ferre’s replacement of 62-year-old Marc Bohan, who had designed the Dior couture collections for 28 years--18 years longer than Dior himself--signals the end of the aristocratic and dynastic structure of haute couture, with control passing to a new generation of businessmen.
(Forty-year-old Bernard Arnault, a former real estate developer, took over Dior in 1984, bankrolled Christian Lacroix in 1987 and this year won control of Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy, now the parent company of Hubert de Givenchy. In other similar moves, the Midland Bank has gained control of the 100-year-old House of Jeanne Lanvin, and Citibank has a stake in the Ted Lapidus and Olivier Lapidus companies.)
Still others see Ferre’s accession to the Dior design throne as further proof of an Italian invasion of French fashion. (Last January, Rome-based Valentino presented his couture collection in Paris for the first time. Milan’s Gianni Versace also debuted a small, made-to-order collection in Paris at that time. Romeo Gigli forsook Milan for Paris in March, when he opened his ready-to-wear collection in the City of Light, announcing: “All of Europe is the same place.” Italian-born Angelo Tarlazzi, who was handpicked to succeed Paris couturier Guy Laroche before he died earlier this year, showed his first collection for the house on Tuesday. And two of France’s best-known couturiers of today have Italian roots--Pierre Cardin was born there and Emanuel Ungaro was born in France to Italian parents.)
To the man in the center of this fashion maelstrom, the whole thing is a perfectly logical expression of a soon-to-be common, barrier-free Europe--a kind of dressy dress rehearsal for Europe’s reunification in 1992.
“Fashion today is international at every level,” says Ferre, who, like the late Christian Dior, trained as an architect. Like Dior too, Ferre is something of a walking rotunda--a rotunda with epicurean tastes. (One of his favorite Milan restaurants is Aurora, where he and his appetite for Piedmontese cooking and his passion for chestnuts are well known.)
A relative newcomer to the fashion big leagues--11 years by his count--he sees his new assignment as “an opportunity to bring a new modernity to a house known for its great sense of classic femininity.”
‘We Can Upset Tradition’
In describing his plan for Dior, he explains: “I believe we can upset tradition only if we maintain the charm of tradition intact.”
The biggest surprise he’s encountered since his arrival in Paris last May is the great support and quality he’s found among the workers at Dior. Especially, he says, with the older workers, many of whom felt the abrupt departure of longtime boss Bohan was not handled with Parisian kid gloves.
“I give them 12 sketches one day and they give me the toiles (the muslin prototypes) the next,” he enthuses, obviously impressed by the skill and efficiency of those in the atelier.
While he does not work in the famous wood-paneled sanctuary used by Dior, preferring the new design offices on the third floor of the Avenue Montaigne headquarters, Ferre says he does use Dior’s design room for fittings. There is no real difference between working in Paris and working in Milan, he says, mainly because many of his Milan assistants--he calls them guys--are now with him in Paris.
In a keynote speech he gave at the International Design Conference in Aspen, Colo., last month, Ferre listed the major influences in his design philosophy as Japan, especially in terms of court- and folk-dress patterns; India, where he lived in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s; Oriental doctrines and Zen philosophy, and the decorative currents from the Baroque to the 19th-Century-Romantic periods.
50 Designs a Day
“I design with a quick, energetic hand,” he explained. “In a single day--if a good one--I can sketch 50, 60 designs, whether in my studio, in my laboratory crowded with collaborators, or in a car--I don’t drive. In one year I end up creating as many as 5,000 models. Working with a black soft-tip pen, I sketch out precise, synthetic silhouettes enclosed in diagonal and parallel lines, thinking never in terms of clothes immobile on a hanger but of those full of animation, movement.”
Ferre describes the relationship between architecture and fashion this way: “Seemingly, architecture is hard; clothes soft. But even if clothes are soft, I design for something definitive, hard--the human body.”
He says the parallel between designing a house and a dress is “the elimination of what is not essential,” adding that a window is the equivalent of the collar of a blouse.
A Peter Ustinov look-alike, Ferre loves to have conversations with himself about his collections, delivering printed transcripts to journalists a day or so before his ready-to-wear openings in Milan.
Ongoing Challenge
Ferre’s ongoing challenge at Dior will be to leave his own stamp on the label without canceling its reputation as the world’s most successful couture house. (Dior press attache Jane Cattani says Dior sells from 1,500 to 2,000 couture pieces twice yearly to about 300 customers. Couture sales in 1988 were $7.5 million, compared with the overall Dior volume, including fragrances, couture, lucrative licensing agreements and ready-to-wear, of $1.15 billion--40.3% in North America.)
The designer will not discuss his salary, but Ferre chairman Franco Mattioli told Women’s Wear Daily in May that the Ferre portion of the Dior budget is “obviously . . . much higher than the $2 million that has been going around.” The “going around” reference was to widely circulated reports that Dior’s $2-million job offer already had been turned down by Claude Montana, Thierry Mugler, Donna Karan and Angelo Tarlazzi.
Ferre says he has never met Bohan, that his contract is for five years, that he will continue to design his own signature ready-to-wear collections as well as both the couture and ready-to-wear for Dior, that he will drop his own 2-year-old couture collection and that for one year, at least, his Paris home will be the Plaza Athenee Hotel, just across the street from Dior.
