Tuesday, January 17, 2012

Read of the Month

Dior Couture by Patrick Demarchelier

Just when you thought Dior couture couldn’t get any more dreamy, along comes the renowned photographer Patrick Demarchelier to shoot 60 years’ worth of it for a glorious new book.

It took the French photographer Patrick Demarchelier a year and a half to draw together all the elements for his new book, Dior Couture. He shot more than 100 couture dresses spanning over six decades from 1947 to 2011, designed by four different men – Christian Dior, Yves Saint Laurent, Marc Bohan and John Galliano – in locations from the beach at Deauville via a Beijing film studio to Times Square, New York. Seventy-two models and 24 different combinations of the world’s leading stylists, make-up, and hair artists were also employed. But then how can you scrimp on effort when you’re celebrating garments that, as Demarchelier points out, “take hundreds, sometimes thousands, of hours” to make?

It is always wonderful to see great images of couture – this is the closest, after all, that many of us will get to the finest clothing in the world – and Dior and Demarchelier are a wow-inducing combination. The vivid color and theatricality of the clothes, particularly during John Galliano’s era, make for some operatic pictures. Breathing life into these spectacular garments is Demarchelier’s selection of 'modern’ women, otherwise known as the best models in the business, including Natalia Vodianova, Gisele Bündchen, Agyness Deyn, and Jourdan Dunn. Embodying the spirit of those different designers’ visions, they make the book not only a celebration of exquisite costume, but of femininity across the best part of a century.

Our feature today brings us an exclusive ‘making of’ video, which allows us to sneak behind the velvet rope of a Demarchelier shoot, showcasing not only Demarchelier himself but also the rest of the usually invisible cast that works on a fashion shoot. As Demarchelier is the first to point out, these things are not a one-man show. “Fashion photography is always a team effort, with many people working together – the stylist, make-up artist, hairstylist…” he says. “On this book, the interesting thing was to also have different teams working on the project, which contributed to the idea of having different visions of Dior. But they all worked, as I did, with the same desire to make this book come to life.”

The photographs reveal both the grand scale and the intimacy required for such creation, the frantic chorus and hubbub, the perspiration and inspiration, that lead up to the harnessing of that silent, single instant. There is the make-up artist working on her model amid a throng of interested parties; the hairstylist struggling to reach the tip of a towering white pompadour wig (a 6ft girl in 6in heels in a foot-high wig – you try it!); the group effort required to dress (while in a forest) a real live woman in garments so engineered they doubtless come with minds of their own; the trendy models in cut-off denims and leather who will gradually metamorphose into those enigmatic Dior women.

“I never thought of the photographs as a retrospective,” insists Demarchelier, who came up with the idea while shooting for Vanity Fair magazine in the Dior atelier on Avenue Montaigne, Paris. And one of its beauties, in fact, is its lack of an imposed chronology. Designs from years and decades apart run alongside each other or are sometimes worn together by the same model.

In one image, styled by Carine Roitfeld, the former editor of French Vogue, a model wears a spring/summer 1948 houndstooth jacket by Dior, a fall/winter 1963 leopard-print sweater by Marc Bohan and a spring/summer 2011 pencil skirt by Galliano. In another, she wears a rose-print dress from 1952 and a 1970 leopard coat. The effect is unquestionably contemporary. “I never had the sense that I was working with old dresses,” says Demarchelier. “Even the Christian Dior dresses dating back to the 1940s or 1950s – which are so beautiful and exquisitely made – are still modern. It’s mind-blowing, they’re totally up to date. It was wonderful getting to work with archive pieces. I discovered dresses from the past that are utterly extraordinary, not outdated at all, stunning in their classicism and beauty.”

Demarchelier is also keen to point out the photo in the front of the book “of the atelier in their white shirts. I love it,” he says. The atelier, of course, is the other invisible cast without whom these photographs would have been impossible. While the star designers have been busy rising and falling, these skilled workers have been the one constant, putting in hours of craftsmanship to create the seemingly impossible. ‘The Dior ateliers are a truly impressive and moving place,” says Demarchelier. “Being able to unveil this work and give access to all these treasures was wonderful.”