“It would be so nice if something made sense for a change.” —Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Lewis Carroll, 1865)
Nonsense and fairy tales. Alice in Wonderland. Maria Grazia Chiuri found her inner child while researching a spring couture collection that she wanted to be “full of joyfulness, dreams, and playfulness.”
There were mini crinolines, pannier skirts, and big cage skirts—a couple the size a child could play house under in a garden. Little thickets of foliage and streamers of embroidered flowers trailed and floated from hemlines. Everything was matched with a pair of frilly bloomers.
Look 36, a short black minidress with ruffles on the shoulder, was a kind of coda for the collection. It harked back to the time when Yves Saint Laurent designed his A-line collection for the house, following the death of Christian Dior. “I discovered that his idea for this collection was children’s clothes scaled up.”
Except for a palette rigorously reduced to black, beige, and white, Chiuri said she let her imagination run free across fashion history, with some side research on the work of the Surrealist painters Leonor Fini and Dorothea Tanning, and of course, Lewis Carroll’s Alice.
“So the idea was, over this last six months, eight months, I was obsessed with the history of fashion,” Chiuri said. Armed with the through-a-child’s-eye filter, she felt the freedom “to go back to this reference, but spontaneously, with a different approach.” So different centuries cropped up: the shape of 17th-century tailcoats, Edwardian leg-of-mutton puffed sleeves, a version of Christian Dior’s 1947 Bar jacket, and lots of tiered capes (a feathery one that bore a pale resemblance to Fini’s paintings of women with organic cloaks).
Some of the looks even looked like joyful round-and-round scribbles done by a child. A couple of others, poufs of grayish organza, were whorled onto crinis as if they were a kid’s idea of cumulus clouds: “Look, that one’s like a rose!”
There weren’t any literal references to the famous John Tenniel illustrations of Alice in her blue dress and apron. But perhaps the thought of a Victorian childhood suggested the sweet passage of eyelet lace crinolines and bodices. Traditionally, summer haute couture collections contain suggestions for wedding dresses. There might be brides who would marry in frilly bloomers, but for those who won’t, personalization is always possible. Even if not everything makes sense (to quote Alice’s complaint), at haute couture, the whole point is that those who can afford it can have everything they dream of.
1 / 10
Look 4
2 / 10
Look 12
3 / 10
Look 19
4 / 10
Look 24
5 / 10
Look 25
6 / 10
Look 30
7 / 10
Look 36
8 / 10
Look 39
9 / 10
