Christian Dior by John Galliano
Haute Couture Spring/Summer 1998
In this design, John Galliano for Dior combined the elements of a robe à la française with the vast crinolined silhouettes of the mid-nineteenth century. The stomacher, open overskirt, and petticoat are expressly eighteenth century, but the huge wired cages that support the skirts over nine feet wide are constructed more like the hoops of the Second Empire than the discrete by comparison panniers of the ancien régime. While the eighteenth-century woman could at least sidle through a doorway, Galliano’s beauties, because of the depths of their skirts, would have to torque and deform their hoops to squeeze their way through.
