The atelier on Avenue Montaigne still keeps a mannequin dressed in the Bar suit

The atelier on Avenue Montaigne still keeps a mannequin dressed in the Bar suit. Not a replica — the original toile, pinned and re-pinned in February 1947, before the first show. The shoulders slope gently. The waist cinches to what was then considered shocking: eighteen inches, though few who wore it actually measured that. The skirt bells out over layers of horsehair and taffeta, hitting mid-calf. Stand close enough and you can see the pin-marks in the linen, small constellations where Monsieur Dior's hands adjusted the line by a quarter-inch, then another, until the silhouette did what he wanted it to do.

That silhouette — what Carmel Snow called the New Look in a single breathless sentence — was not, strictly speaking, new. It recalled the Belle Époque, the decade before the First World War, when women wore boned bodices and skirts that required scaffolding. But in 1947, after years of rationed cloth and military shoulders, it read as provocation. Dior used twenty-five yards of fabric for a single dress. He made women's bodies into hourglasses again, which required undergarments, which required money, which was precisely the point. This was not fashion for austerity. This was fashion as an argument that austerity had ended, whether or not that was strictly true.

Christian Dior himself lasted ten years. He died in 1957, at fifty-two, of a heart attack in Montecatini. By then he had opened salons in five countries, licensed his name to stockings and perfume, and made the maison the most commercially successful couture house in Paris. He was also, by several accounts, exhausted. The workload of producing two full collections a year, plus travel, plus the American ready-to-wear lines that paid for everything else, had left him thin and unwell. The house he built, though, was constructed to survive him. It had systems, licenses, an atelier structure that could be handed to the next man. And so it was.

Yves Saint Laurent and the hinge years

The next man was twenty-one. Yves Saint Laurent had been Dior's assistant for three years, sketching in a small room off the main studio, rarely speaking. When he was named successor, the press treated it as a gamble. It was not, quite. Dior had been preparing him, and Saint Laurent understood the house codes — the nipped waist, the full skirt, the emphasis on a defined silhouette. His first collection, the Trapeze line of spring 1958, softened those codes without abandoning them. The waist rose. The skirt swung free from the hip. It was still Dior, but Dior after a long exhale.

Saint Laurent's tenure lasted six collections. The Trapeze succeeded. The next four were well-received. The sixth, in 1960, included a black leather motorcycle jacket worn over a mink collar, and beat-inspired knits that the press called too young, too street, too much. The collection sold poorly. Saint Laurent was then drafted into the French military, suffered a breakdown, and was released from both the army and the house within months. The official story was health. The operational story was that Marc Bohan, his successor, had already been chosen.

What Saint Laurent did in those three years, though, was prove that Dior could be something other than what Christian Dior had made it. The house was not a monument. It was a structure that could be reinterpreted, within limits. Those limits would be tested more aggressively later, but Saint Laurent set the terms: respect the atelier, respect the silhouette, but do not merely repeat.

Galliano and the theatre of excess

When John Galliano was named artistic director in 1996, the house had been coasting. Marc Bohan had retired. Gianfranco Ferré, his successor, had produced elegant, architectural work that sold well in Asia and nowhere else. The LVMH acquisition in 1984 had stabilized the business, but the maison had no heat. It was a name, a logo, a fragrance cash-engine. Galliano, who had been staging spectacular, near-bankrupt shows in Paris basements for a decade, was brought in to make noise.

He made noise. His first haute couture collection, spring 1997, opened with a model in an embroidered coat that weighed forty pounds, followed by a bias-cut slip dress that looked like it had been dipped in gold leaf, followed by a Madame Butterfly fantasy, followed by a flapper, followed by a geisha, followed by a Can-Can dancer. The show lasted thirty minutes. It referenced eight decades and four continents. It had no coherent thesis except excess itself. The fashion press, which had been prepared to be skeptical, applauded for six minutes.

Galliano's method was collage. He took the Bar jacket and slashed it, re-cut it, embroidered it with 18th-century motifs and then added a pirate hat. He took the New Look silhouette and rendered it in denim, in newspaper print, in shredded tulle. He staged his shows as narrative tableaux: a Parisian salon, a Raj-era railway platform, a Shanghai opium den. The clothes were often unwearable in any practical sense, but that was not the point. The point was to generate images, and the images generated sales. Between 1997 and 2011, Dior's revenue grew from $150 million to over $2 billion. Most of that came from handbags and perfume, but the handbags and perfume sold because Galliano made people look.

He also made people uncomfortable, though that discomfort was largely ignored until it couldn't be. His collections leaned heavily on Orientalist and colonial imagery, often styled with a kind of gleeful disregard for the implications. When he was dismissed in 2011, after a video surfaced of him making anti-Semitic remarks in a Paris bar, the conversation briefly turned to whether the excess had always been a problem, or whether it had simply become one. The house moved on quickly. Raf Simons was hired within a year.

Simons, Chiuri, and the question of now

Raf Simons stripped it back. His first show, in 2012, was shown in a room lined with thousands of white and pink delphiniums, and the clothes were spare, modern, almost austere. He kept the Bar jacket but cut it in bonded neoprene. He kept the full skirt but rendered it in layers of organza so fine they barely held shape. The show was widely praised as a corrective, a return to restraint after fifteen years of theatre. It was also, quietly, a commercial disappointment. The clothes were beautiful and difficult to wear, and the handbag business, which had been counting on heat from the runway, cooled.

Simons left in 2015, citing the pace. He had been producing eight collections a year — haute couture, ready-to-wear, pre-collections, men's — and the schedule, he said later, was unsustainable. Maria Grazia Chiuri replaced him in 2016. She was the first woman to lead the house, a fact that was mentioned in every article and every show note. Her first collection opened with a model in a white T-shirt that read "We Should All Be Feminists," a quote from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. The T-shirt sold out in a week.

Chiuri's Dior is less interested in silhouette than in message. She references folk costume, suffragette whites, warrior archetypes. She collaborates with female artists — Judy Chicago, Mickalene Thomas, Shirin Neshat — and stages her shows as installations. The clothes themselves are often softer than Galliano's, less constructed than Simons's, more concerned with ease and wearability. Whether this constitutes a coherent vision or a series of gestures is still being argued. The business, though, is unambiguous. Dior is now the largest brand in the LVMH portfolio, generating over $8 billion annually. Most of that is accessories, skincare, and fragrance, but the runway sets the tone.

The mannequin, still

The Bar suit toile is still there, in the atelier. It is kept in a glass case now, climate-controlled, under museum-grade lighting. Apprentices are sometimes brought to see it, as part of their training, though they are not allowed to touch. The lesson, one assumes, is about precision: how a quarter-inch adjustment can change a line, how a line can change a silhouette, how a silhouette can, under the right conditions, change what people think fashion is for. Whether that lesson still applies in an era of T-shirts and feminist slogans and $8 billion in revenue is a question the house does not seem particularly interested in answering. The toile remains, pinned and fading slightly under the lights, and the work continues around it.