Dior and Saint Laurent look back to 1960s

Two fashion heavyweights looked back to the 1960s at Paris Fashion Week on Tuesday, with Christian Dior paying homage to the revolutionary "Miss Dior" line and Saint Laurent building a collection around the transparent sheer outfits beloved of its founder.

The see-through dress has been a celebrity fashion staple over the past year, and Saint Laurent took it to the extreme with extensive use of materials "like mist", according to the show notes.

Anthony Vaccarello, who has directed the French house since 2016, revisited one of Yves Saint Laurent's obsessions: "minimising the distance between fabric and skin".

Guests including Kate Moss and K-Pop megastar Jisoo were treated to waves of chiffon, lace and tulle, offering a more risque version of the luxury nightwear of recent seasons -- and impeccably timed to coincide with an exhibition entitled "Sheer" at the Yves Saint Laurent Museum.

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Simon Longland, director of buying for London department store Harrods, described it as "bursting with juxtaposition"

"The silhouette, cut and styling was in large part ladylike and conservative in its femininity -- think pencil skirts, pussy blow blouses and delicate hosiery -- (but) delivered in fabrications that were mostly sheer and slinky," he said.

'Miss Dior' reborn

Earlier, a starry audience including Jennifer Lawrence and Natalie Portman saw a very different ode to the past at Christian Dior.

Its collection was almost entirely monochrome and beige -- a heady mix of nouveau riche fantasy, from gabardine to the little white dress, via tweed and more urban denim and leopard-print styles.

It harked back to the launch of the "Miss Dior" line in 1968, when a daring new vision of femininity emerged for newly liberated women.

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It was named after the founder's sister, Catherine Dior, a resistance hero who suffered a traumatic period in a Nazi concentration camp.

It's a story told in the current Apple TV series "The New Look", and the stars were present for Tuesday's show, including Ben Mendelsohn, who plays Christian Dior, and Maisie Williams, who plays Catherine.

"I wouldn't say I've become a fashionista since doing the show, but I'm certainly more appreciative of the role that fashion plays," Mendelsohn told AFP.

"I'm still really just sort of hit with the force of the looks and the enormous variety of it, I mean there's a lot of pieces there!"

The first full day of the womenswear autumn/winter collections began earlier with the typically classy stylings of Spain's Victoria and Tomas earlier in the day.

Their show, inspired by Auguste Rodin's "The Kiss", featured lots of knotted details and scarves integrated into dresses that evoked classical sculpture.

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The husband-and-wife team -- a rarity in the fashion world -- founded their brand in 2012 after Tomas Berzins and Victoria Feldman met at a Paris design school.

"'The Kiss' is really a balance between something very heavy and cold like marble and something warm and fast like movement," Feldman told AFP.

Source: AFP