Quite honestly, I am not a clothes person. My wife thinks that I live in the world of my peasant ancestors. The last thing I thought was, since I am a maven for the written word and the visual, that I'd give a turn looking at Frederic Chang's 'Dior and I'. If I didn't like it, fine, I'd stop the machine, and that would be the end of that. What I didn't expect: I was totally absolved by the arrival of Raf Simons as creative director 0f the House of Dior. An unlikely choice, it first appeared since he came from the ready to wear men's line of clothing to a culture that dressed women since 1947. But wiser heads prevailed, since Simons was a breath of fresh wind that swept away the dark clouds that Dior was under and with the departure of John Galliano for his anti-Semitic remarks. Had the brand fallen on hard times? Simons, in his brief three years at Dior, brought a vision of the 21 century to Dior that as Cheng's camera shows wasn't out of step with Christian Dior, as Cheng cuts in and out with clips and the words and at times the words of Dior on the feminine and dressing women to reflect her essence after seven years of war. And odd as it may sound, Simons' notions of beauty mirrored strangely and broadly with that of Dior's. What makes the arrival of Simons at Dior is how he and the team of Dior workers engaged in a felicitous dance of making Dior what it was a foremost house of haute couture. Cheng brings us closer to the heart of the House of Dior through the very people that sew, cut, fashion the ideas of Simons to the public as well as upholding the high standards of Dior and what that name means to the world. Under the rafters of the House of Dior on the Avenue Montaigne, we 'work' with the team Dior, some new others at the House since 42 years, as they labor right up to the last minute to bring the world of fashion Simons' first collection. As for him, he is more or less easy in working with people and encourages harmony to achieve his goals. He reads much, he goes to museums, and we even seen Dior's house painted in rose among gardens of flowers and emanating the feeling of spring. Although he is out of the world of the male, he grasps the ideal of making women beautiful, and finds colors and a freshness say in the paintings of Jeff Koons, the American painter who finds the beautiful in the most banal, as Simons' conceit to lift up a new palette in a Dior classicism but with a very modern twist. Simons has a temper for sure, but he is honest, the honesty of the Dutch burgher, which surfaces through the layers of haute couture. Cheng has done his best to show the choice of Simons wasn't something out of left field. In fact it was spot on and his choice by Dior's 32 percent share holder Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessey and Sydney Toldeano who presided over Dior's expansion was not only right but a stroke of good luck. 'Dior and I' is a work of love, it seems, and ought to be seen for fashion and the team that makes Dior, and has made Dior, a world class standard of high fashion.
