Unveiling Dior’s Cruise Collection

Collected by Anila Bangash
SAM Daily Times

The silk scarf, or French Carré, was the leitmotif of the collection, but 

unraveled, sliced and diced for American appetites. 

The first time I flew on Air France, knuckles paling well in advance per usual, a friend tried to calm me by invoking the comparative chic of the flight attendants. “They all have these ...scarves,” she said, waving her hands at her throat to indicate the mysterious dexterity of these foreigners.

The silk scarf, or French carré, was the official leitmotif of Raf Simons’s 2015 cruise collection for Dior, but unraveled, sliced and diced for American appetites: spliced into clashing bodices and spread into flowing handkerchief hems. Program notes, digested under the hot lights as one of roughly 900 at the Duggal Greenhouse of the Brooklyn Navy Yard on Wednesday evening, suggested that Mr. Simons had transubstantiated this accessory into a flag, and a white one at that.

But though the designer cited the influence of United States fashion history, he didn’t surrender to it.

There was plenty of black

“Could that be macramé?” one thought, cocking an eye at skirts flared in the classic Dior manner. Yes, and indeed that knotting technique was used by sailors long before 1970s camp counselors, so it was especially apt considering the maritime setting. (With all the slightly green faces on the undulating ferry on the way over, “clutch purse,” of which there were also several here, took on a whole new meaning.) There was fringe, though on the bottom, unlike the surrey. Coats of different exotic furs were bound by patchwork (it can get chilly on the poop deck with Captain Stubing, after all), single pockets jauntily adorned a couple of high-waist skirts, and a few organza dresses were bright as Tropicana.

But aside from that and what looked to be oversize towels dangling from one or two hands, there was little on the long, mazelike runway that suggested the sense of pleasure and frivolity one usually associates with a cruise (a private one, anyway). The models were to a woman fierce and unsmiling. There was plenty of black, not generally a color one associates with rich people going on vacation.

And the toeless ankle boots and sleeveless coats, staples of the runway now but ever jarring, were a reminder that we are living in a world in which the very concept of seasons is changing before our eyes. There was something apocalyptic about the whole elaborate shebang or, at the least, a few pangs of motion sickness that even a scarf, or the most beautiful embroidery over the solar plexus, could not possibly soothe.