Ferre-ting Out a New Dior Look : Fashion: The first efforts by the company’s new designer include some hits, more misses.
There’s a bear behind Christian Dior. He’s a furry-faced, Italian-born aesthete with a 50-plus inch waist, who likes his neckties polka-dotted and his Vivaldi played full blast.
Or he could be a bear, if he were not the very human, Milanese designer, Gianfranco Ferre, who took over as artistic director for Dior in Paris last spring, in a cross-cultural merger that set tongues wagging from here to the ends of Italy.
How could a designer known for clothes as clean-lined as a Brancusi sculpture fit in at flouncy-feminine Dior?
How could a man from the land of the meatball steal such a big bite from the land of goose pate?
Nine months after the fact, Ferre still has little to say about it. He’d rather talk about how it’s working out. “Two days in Milan, three days in Paris,” he says. He commutes, designing the Dior collections in one city, his own, signature line of 12 years in the other.
Of course, his work for the Ferre label got him his job at Dior, with a reported salary of more than $2 million per year. But while he is well- established as a world-class talent who has been awarded Italy’s fashion “Oscar” (l’Occhio d’Oro, or The Golden Eye) five times, his designs for Dior haven’t yet set the world on fire.
Ferre was in Los Angeles this week, presenting his first ready-to-wear Dior line, and a few styles from his second couture collection, at a show hosted by I. Magnin. By the end of the week Magnin will have opened Dior boutiques in the Beverly Hills and Los Angeles stores. In addition, Dior plans to open its own, free-standing shops in Beverly Hills and New York late this year.
Dior’s entrenchment, which began before Ferre’s arrival, was instigated by Beatrice Bongibault-Dhjan, the company’s managing director of just two years. She hired Ferre as part of her program to rebuild the Dior image outside Paris, where it has become equated with perfume and liscensees for mass-produced accessories, men’s neckties and women’s sportswear amounting to $1.15 billion in worldwide sales last year. A veteran of the French fashion scene, she was managing director at Chanel for almost 10 years, and hired Karl Lagerfeld to revitalize that sagging house.
“Mr. Ferre will help bring us to the place where we should be in the ‘90s,” she says. With her record of success, it’s difficult to doubt.
But so far, the clothes aren’t as convincing. The best outfits blend Ferre’s personal love for luxury fabrics and sophisticated engineering with Dior’s hyper-feminine details--soft bows, big skirts and perky white cuffs.
He manages it best in one particular pair of sliver-thin silk pants from his new couture collection. They have no pockets, no man-tailored details at the waist, and they appear to be seamless, from the high waist straight to the ankle-grazing hemline. A white lace top, as constructed as a jacket but as fitted as a blouse, is another standout. Several suits in peppy, Dior polka dots, cut to Ferre’s streamline standards, are other hints for the ‘90s.
The collection goes off track when Ferre gets sentimentally sweet, as in an off-the-shoulder top cut as full as maternity wear, decorated with big, droopy bows. And even though his entrance-making couture evening gowns, whose trains wrap and tie to resemble outerwear are ingenious, they are remarkably impractical. The trains demand to be held in the wearer’s arms all evening, or left trailing behind to be tripped on.
After the luncheon show staged for The Colleagues, a fund-raising social group, several women in the audience remarked that the clothes looked pretty, but not wearable. These body-conscious Southern Californians couldn’t relate to the many tent-shaped tops, dresses and coats in the collection. “They belong on size 44 women,” one quipped. (Prices for the clothes range from about $2,500 for a daytime ready-to-wear suit, to as much as $40,000 for a couture evening gown.)
I. Magnin CEO Rose Marie Bravo points out that Bergdorf-Goodman shoppers in Manhattan spent $100,000 in just one morning at a recent trunk show of Dior ready to wear. “We did better than that in Beverly Hills alone,” she says of her store’s own recent trunk show.
Ferre, meanwhile, continues to study for his new role. He’s been looking through the original sketches and actual garments by the late designer.
“Mr. Dior and I have certain affinities, I now see,” says Ferre. “We build an outfit the same way, with clean lines, attained in the easiest way.”
He can see it in his own mind. The trick is to translate it to the clothes.
