The tedious repetition of luxury fashion

The rich pasts of brands like Valentino, Dior and Schiaparelli are currently compensating for a lack of bold new ideas. What does that mean for their future?

Last Autumn, the Kunstmuseum Den Haag staged an exhibition titled Dior – A New Look. The tale it told was a familiar one. Like the Musée des Arts Décoratifs’ 2017 Christian Dior: couturier de rêve, which has since travelled in slightly altered guises to the Brooklyn Museum, the V&A, Shanghai’s West Bund Museum, and, most recently, Riyadh’s Saudi National Museum, it combined the adulatory thrill of a good origin story – in this case, Christian Dior revolutionising post-war women’s dress via big skirts and tiny waists – with a genealogical survey of the brand’s six subsequent creative directors; each tasked with conducting a delicate dance between homage and novelty as they paid fealty to the house’s founder whilst carving out their own vision (and revenue) for the famed French label.

In the Kunstmuseum’s exhibition, Maria Grazia Chiuri was given the largest spotlight, positioned not just as a creative director but a quasi-spiritual inheritor, a designer who, as the house’s first female lead, allegedly shared M. Dior’s “bold… progressive style” and had “modernised the fashion house, out of her desire to design for modern women.” The museum illustrated this facetious claim via a classic side-by-side pairing: Dior’s original 1947 Bar jacket sat alongside Chiuri’s lighter, looser interpretation, styled unbuttoned over her infamous "We Should All Be Feminists" T-shirt. Its claim to revolutionary progress was weak, the design limp and almost apologetic compared to a nearby interpretation by John Galliano, brazenly sat atop a puddle of blue ruffles.

The Bar jacket is one of those garments or accessories, like Chanel’s tweeds and pearls or Burberry’s trench coat, that tends to be tackled by all incoming creative directors. It becomes a test of design mettle, a timekeeping riddle in which all the tenses must be satisfied at once: due reverence for the past (without being dated), sufficient daring in the melding of present and near future such that the resulting designs feel fresh, relevant and, ideally, just ahead of the curve. But over the past couple of years, the line between reinterpretation and replication has grown fainter, many of the largest, most legacy-aware houses rummaging through their back catalogues, not for creative spurs or generative starting points but blueprints that can be safely followed again and again.