The House of Dior
November 12, 2025
Seventy Years of Haute Couture.
National Gallery of Victoria, Australia.
August 27 to November 7, 2017.
November 2017, a friend and I flew to Melbourne for the day to experience the ‘House of Dior: Seventy Years of Haute Couture‘ exhibition, held at the National Gallery of Victoria [Australia].
I am not not a Christian Dior [the designer/the house/the brand] fan. I view Dior garments objectively, as stunning works of wearable art that are also zeitgeist markers. I just don’t connect with any era Dior designs as expressions of my personality [and have an irrational dislike of the “J’adore Dior” ads. This is a great read about the ads. No hate against Charlize the Great.]
As a journalist with a special interest in fashion, of course I have always known of and appreciate Dior the House’s contribution to shaping history [yes pun intended] and its continuing significant instances in the Euroworld. Particularly the impact of the now iconic Bar Suit [part of the legendary ‘Corolle‘ line, which debuted in February 1947] which may have been conceived by Mr Dior but was designed and constructed by Dior’s tailleur atelier Pierre Cardin… I EXPLORE DIOR here.
In the gallery [click to enlarge] there are photos of me standing in front of a photo of the Christian Dior house models, photographed arriving in Australia in November 1957, here to present the CD Autumn/Winter 1957 haute couture collection at Myer Mural Hall, Melbourne.
In the photo, taken by Loomis Dean, the woman on the extreme right is Svetlana Lloyd, a Russian-born ballet dancer and one of Dior’s House “Mannequins“, who 60 years later helped launch the exhibition at the inaugural NGV Gala on Saturday 26 August 2017. Ms Lloyd, who was in her mid 80s in 2017, and still moves with elegant dancer/model bearing, shared her memories in this NGV video and this ABC Aus article from 2017.
Photo 1 shows the iconic 1947 Bar jacket, ” afternoon ensemble”, this one made in 1987.
Photo 4 shows the Red Bar Coat from Raf Simons debut couture collection for Dior in 2012, and especially made for the exhibition. Watch the making of it here.
Fashion and/or Dior fans, you can watch Simons’ design process in this 2014 dressumentary 😉 ‘Dior and I‘.
The Autumn/Winter 1957 haute couture collection ‘Ligne Fuseau‘, (‘Spindle Line’, which should explain the collection’s feel, see some pieces here at The Met) was Mr Dior’s last collection, as he passed away suddenly in October that year. The November fashion shows in Australia went ahead as planned as Dior already had a solid fashionship with Australia since 1948, thanks to The Australian Women’s Weekly’s fashion facilitator Mary Horden.
In her very first column in The Australian Women’s Weekly, November 1945, Horden wrote;
“My ambition … is to give women the best ideas from the world’s greatest designers. Few can buy model frocks, but every woman wants her clothes to make the most of her Personality. […] “A certain amount of adaptation is necessary to make overseas designs suitable for wear in this country. I hope my pages will supply Australian women with ideas for clothes, highlighting the latest fashion trends and yet entirely suitable for our climate and way of life.”
– READ MORE ‘How The Weekly brought Dior to Australia’, [June, 2024] – The Australian Women’s Weekly
I expand on The Weekly in I EXPLORE DIOR.
Watch the July 1948 spring fashion parade at David Jones in Sydney here, considered to be the first complete Dior collection to be shown outside of Paris.
Sartorial exhibitions are the National Gallery of Victoria’s forte, as a Sydneysider I am envious! Melbourne often gets breathlessly described as the artistic fashion capital of Australia, which nowadays means they wear luxury athleisure wear out to brunch.
Katie Somerville, the Senior Curator of Fashion and Textiles at the NGV, has been in the department since 1995 and has accrued an impressive resume, which includes ‘The House of Dior: Seventy Years of Haute Couture’. Somerville was the lead curator and had spent “years sourcing garments” and researching the collection for the exhibition. The accolades are well deserved but the choices are predictable. Safe for resume and Eurogaze.
A current exhibition spotlights Australian born, Paris based Martin Grant and opening in December is the Vivienne Westwood and Rei Kawakubo, exhibition, a fashion connoisseur’s dream but, as groundbreaking as flowers for spring…
Now finally we live in those interesting times that Austin Chamberlain claimed. The Colonised Generations are shaking off the stupor of oppression. Change is in the air not because it was promised but because it is time for the current Empire of Themocracy to step… up or step away.
As “inclusive” as NGV feels they are, they could do with some Melanin and expansive thinking starting with their “key people“. National galleries have a duty to not just elevate and expand their visitors’ cultural horizons but also represent the diverse cultural population they purport to want to educate
…but Arts in Australia is very much a gatekept enclave.
“Key People” almost always looks like a cabal, “diversity” is dependent on what gender/’minority’/”
Digress break: imagine if babies and toddlers were giants and didn’t shrink down to adult size until… mid teens… yep, welcome to 2025.
We didn’t need Amnesty to tell us that “The world is at a historic juncture. […] the world has witnessed a steady spread of authoritarian laws, policies and practices, shrinking civic space and eroding enjoyment of freedom of expression or association.” – THE STATE OF THE WORLD’S HUMAN RIGHTS, April 2025 by Agnès Callamard, Secretary General of Amnesty International.
We all wear clothes, even the nudists but not everyone understands that fashion isn’t about clothing, well not just. It’s about the spirit of the times. You can tell what decade, what era, by the clothes that were worn at the time. Clothing is the ultimate zeitgeist marker.
Dior created his 1947 collection as a backlash to the austerity and lack of everything during war times [when has Europe not been at war] and… Mr Dior preferred women to be like “flowers”. He preferred them in a vase, delicate, with a waist that required entrails to be removed.
That didn’t not necessarily make him misogynist, ‘just’ sexist and insular, his designs for Women were about how he wanted them to look. Dior was gay, and he apparently “adored” women, just not their bodies. He wanted to make dresses that contained them while enhancing their natural silhouettes, many times exaggerating the female form.
Aesthetics first, comfort be damned. Male designers think about the viewer. Women designers think about the wearer. There is room for both because yes, dressing a Woman is big fun, I get it boys, Women are such dolls. We’re just so darn pesky with our demands for rights and all. I expand on this in I EXPLORE DIOR.
Clothing is a language, created by human beings to represent who we are. Coverings act not just as protection but as the proverbial book cover and have done so from before we had words to articulate thoughts in our head. Sartorial exhibitions showcasing global designers and artisans help make the art of garmenture less… foreign. More accessible as relevant inspiration and communication and works of art that talk to the viewer.
Communication from all over the world, exhibitions showcasing the GLOBAL world’s best known sartorial communicators and therefore historians, like Sabyasachi from India, or a full exhibition spotlighting and explaining the artistry of Guo Pei, from China, who was shown as an art installation at NGV’s Trennial 2017 with ensembles from ‘Legend’, her 2017 spring-summer couture show in Paris.
[I have had the pleasure of seeing up close and photographing Guo Pei’s exquisite designs, at Singapore Fashion Week October 2016. VISUAL STORY 22/11]
… or why not a truly special retrospective introducing to Australians the legendary Black American designers Zelda Barbour Wynn Valdes, Ann Lowe or Stephen Burrows, to name a few that gave so much talent to The Great American Myth for so little recognition or southern hemisphere region names like AZA?
Or even a Tribute to Orry Kelly. An AUSTRALIAN.
I do look forward to NGV evolving out of predictability and breaking the white sealing that keeps them in The National Enclaves of Australia
by Sandhya Nand, Publisher.
