Paris Fashion Week: Dior and Saint Laurent, two fans of the sixties

Dior and Saint Laurent unveiled their Autumn-Winter 2024-2025 collections at Paris Fashion Week. The two standard-bearers of French luxury, owned by the LVMH and Kering groups, each offered their own reinterpretation of the sixties woman, in the volcanic year of ’68.

On the second day of Paris Fashion Week (February 26-March 5, 2024), Dior and Saint Laurent both put on a show offering a retelling of the 1960s. On the program: pleated skirts, go-go boots and leopard print for Maria Grazia Chiuri at Dior; pencil skirts, lavaliere blouses, No bra and steamy fabrics playing the transparency card for Anthony Vaccarello at Saint Laurent.

The two Parisian luxury houses paid tribute to their archives: Dior to Marc Bohan, its creative director, who created the Miss Dior line in 1967, appearing as a libertarian slogan, and Saint Laurent to its 1968 fashion show, which introduced transparency into its collections under the impetus of its founder.

For once, earthy tones, very present at Saint Laurent, have made their entry at Dior, in particular beige, which in memory has never been seen so much in a Maria Grazia Chiuri collection.

For this Fall-Winter 2024-2025 collection, there is also talk of the Orient, with the installation by Indian artist Shakuntala Kulkarni and the shadow of Marc Bohan, artisan of the House’s beginnings in the land of the Maharajahs (shows in Mumbai and Delhi in 1962) at Dior, as well as the memory of Opium perfume and Yves’ Moroccan memories at Saint Laurent.

Dior or bourgeois swinging London

After a Spring-Summer 2024 show focusing on the archetype of the persecuted witch through the ages and the place of “male gaze” in the openly sexist 1950s advertising campaigns of the real Mad Men of 5th Avenue, Maria Grazia Chiuri turned her attention in this new 2024-2025 opus to the following decade: the 1960s.

To illustrate this period, the artistic director of the House of Dior chose to turn her feminist gaze on 1967, a year on the eve of major social and societal upheavals in France and abroad, but also the year of the launch of the Miss Dior line.

It’s an opportunity to pay tribute to the man behind the House’s first French ready-to-wear line, Marc Bohan, former but little-known creative director of the House of Dior, who passed away last year. Marc Bohan’s unprecedented 30-year tenure came to an abrupt halt in 1989 with the arrival of Gianfranco Ferré as Creative Director, and he was a privileged witness to the major changes that marked the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. Less well known than Saint Laurent Rive Gauche (1966), this Miss Dior line heralded the wave of democratization in fashion. An homage to Christian Dior’s eponymous 1947 fragrance, conceived as a “celebration of femininity, nature and beauty”, it was reinterpreted by Maria Grazia Chiuri in XXL format on pleated, split skirts and chunky wool coats, in the manner of a protest slogan.

1967 was also the year of Serge Gainsbourg’s first recording of “Je t’aime… moi Non Plus” with Brigitte Bardot. The best-known version – recorded this time with Jane Birkin – was released in 1969, a year after the “events”. And this is not the only allusion to the legendary French chanson couple: a remixed, instrumental version of “Requiem pour un C.” (released this time in… 1968) opened and closed the show. The Dior silhouettes were full of nods to Serge and Jane, from the singer’s smoked glasses and dandy-destroy look to the singer’s mini-skirt and baby-boots combo, a tribute to the style inherent in Jane Birkin, who passed away last July.

The show wowed its guests, who included actresses Natalie Portman, Jennifer Lawrence, Elizabeth Debicki (Lady Diana in the Netflix series The Crown) and Kelly Rutherford (Lily van der Woodsen in the 2007 version of “Gossip Girls”), as well as singers Jisoo (BLACKPINK) and Rosalia.

In a half-rock, half-Hollywood spirit on the Tiber, the leopard print so dear to Sophia Loren and Marianne Faithfull was also on show. Featured on wool coats and matching caps, the feline motif revived – with more festive outfits in the second half – a show marked by neutral and beige tones, Burberry trench-style.

However, the prize for transgressive imagery undoubtedly goes to Anthony Vaccarello at Saint Laurent.