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PARIS, July 8, 2002

By Sarah Mower

Bring back glamour! That’s the message John Galliano unleashed at Dior couture, in a collection that had models powering along the runway in ultra-high platforms, tight hobble skirts, massive coats and parkas, impossibly skimpy showgirl dresses and hugely extravagant feathered headdresses culled from the glory years of Hollywood.

The hallucinogenic mix came out of Galliano’s American road trip, which took him and his jolly band of accomplices through Los Angeles and Mexico earlier this year. They ransacked movie studio archives for the costumes of Theda Bara and Marlene Dietrich, and even created a runway replica of the legendary subway grating over which Marilyn Monroe cooled her hot bod in The Seven Year Itch. Galliano said that after then loading up on Mexican religious imagery, “We came back and thought, how would Kate Moss wear this? To me, she’s today’s equivalent of the great Hollywood glamour icons.” Perhaps that accounted for the titanium bosoms and pregnant bellies some of the models were wearing. In any case, with the ostrich feathers and coyote fur flying, and the London Community Gospel Choir singing, this was a multi-everything spectacle, devised to edge Dior into a new phase of Galliano’s master plan.

“We’ve deconstructed Dior, now’s the time to reconstruct, but in a different way,” the designer declared. “Couture can be so heavy, but now we’ve constructed everything on foam, so it’s light as air.”