The Dior haute couture team take us through their process
Senior designers and the wider atelier on what it takes to build a collection by hand.
By Jorinde Croese. Photography Niko Studio
On Sunday morning 10am, we arrived at the Christian Dior Couture studios to watch the team at work before their show the next day. The final fittings were in full swing, the air was filled with hushed whispers to keep a sense of productive calm. Jonathan Anderson, who had just gotten off a flight from New York, where he was for Taylor Swift’s wedding dress, walked around the studio, making last corrections to each look with the designers.
Within minutes of walking through the door, we were standing in front of the line-up board with Susanna Venegas, Design Director Haute Couture, and Pol Anglada, Senior Designer Haute Couture. They talked about Lynda Benglis, the American artist whose work served as the main inspiration, and how they translated her sculptural work into couture. Over the course of the day, we also had a chance to spend time with Elisabetta Finardi, Head of Shoes Collection, Juha Marttila, VP Design Accessories, and Max Lanting, Designer Jewellery, who each talked us through key pieces, before we headed off to speak to the atelier team.
The Benglis collaboration gave the collection a visual anchor rich enough to be pulled in multiple directions at once. In some pieces, the reference is close to literal, like the sculptural lamé forms, the fans she made during her years in India, and the pleated knots that carry her signature. In others, it’s more subtle, like the insistence on lightness or the sense that each material has its own internal logic. What the conversations with the team make clear is how much work it took to get from one to the other, and how much of that work is usually invisible by the time a dress reaches the runway. We started with Pol and Susanna, talking through the collection piece by piece.
Pol Anglada (Senior Designer Haute Couture): Lynda’s work revolves a lot around pleated metallic dots, so the pleating technique throughout the collection dissolves in many different ways, recalling the [iconic Dior] New Look while staying true to Lynda’s practice and the whole handmade element. It’s an interesting surface to explore across different materialities: wool, cashmere, metal thread, and so forth. The pleats transform into a Fortuny type of hand pleat, taking the detail of the knot that oscillates between Christian Dior and Lynda, while also trying to find an intuition in designing the pieces that recall the places that are influential to Lynda, such as New Mexico or the gardens of India; taking a spin and a twist on the flora and the gardens around that.
Susanna Venegas (Design Director Haute Couture): All the lamé work was a real technical challenge. Obviously, Lynda’s work is really sculptural, so we had to find a way for the pieces to hold themselves up without being heavily backed. There’s a whole structural system underneath the dresses that has a lightness but still keeps everything upright.
Jamil Alsamman (Modeliste Haute Couture Flou): The material of this dress is a lamé, and because lamé alone won’t hold a shape like this, there’s a special, more rigid tulle inside, along with a corset boning structure, which together give the dress its form. For the plissé [pleating], we work with a specialist atelier that does it entirely by hand, without any machines. They pleat the fabric several times, we put it on the mannequin, and then we adjust, going back and forth until the movement is right. There was also a great deal of draping involved in this piece. The dress uses nine pieces of fabric in total, around 13 or 14 metres, so it’s quite substantial.