A new interpretation of silhouettes from Christian Dior

Today, with its jutting peplum and narrow waist, it’s become a house icon, and an emblem Raf Simons saw fit to reinterpret for his very first ready-to-wear collection for Christian Dior. Sixty-five years after its creation, the Bar jacket has been restructured and renewed: part tuxedo, part coatdress, part dress paired with pant. In satin and organza, wool and silk, it’s black, cobalt blue or pale green. With a lighter, more fluid construction, it’s the jacket of a free spirit.

    

Christian Dior loved women, desiring to make them look not only more beautiful, but to feel happier, too. Happy to be dazzling and gorgeous, wherever #

After having fashioned women as blooming flowers and women tailored to an H line (whose long and minimized bust alluded to the letter’s shape), in the spring of 1955 Christian Dior invented the A line. Borrowing from the first letter of the alphabet its “free and flaring” line, the couturier created looks with an elongated bust, highlighted by a belt (the letter’s central bar) and opening out with peplums. It’s a collection Monsieur Dior described as “a play on the waist”, set off by a belt, a button, a bow or a yoke that “might as likely be found below the waist as above it, even just below the bust.”

 

For the spring-summer 2013 collection, Raf Simons returned to Monsieur Dior’s alphabet, writing a new chapter in the history of the A line: with its central bar now placed very high on the body on a satin and organza bustier dress, it’s multiplied in horizontal stripes of pale pink and black satin, punctuated by the buttons of a wool jacket-dress, by a metallic belt on a satin cuir dress, or by the pleats on a dress in wool and silk.