The mannequin wears a jacket with shoulders so sloped they look like they might slide off the form entirely

The mannequin wears a jacket with shoulders so sloped they look like they might slide off the form entirely. Waist cinched to the diameter of two hands. Skirt blooming from the hip in pleated wool that weighs, according to the placard, four metres of fabric. This is Bar, from the spring 1947 collection, and it sits behind glass at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs as if it were a Ming vase. Which, in a sense, it is — a thing made by hand, built to a proportion that defied the prevailing logic of its moment, and kept behind vitrine because you cannot let people touch it.

Christian Dior showed that first collection on 12 February 1947, in a private hôtel particulier on avenue Montaigne. Ninety looks. The American press called it the New Look, a term Dior himself never used but never quite shook. What he did say, in his memoir, was simpler: "We were emerging from a period of war, of uniforms, of women-soldiers built like boxers. I drew women-flowers, soft shoulders, flowing busts, fine waists like liana, and wide skirts like corolla."

The collection arrived eighteen months after the Liberation. Fabric was still rationed in Britain. Dior's skirts used twenty-five yards of cloth where wartime silhouettes had made do with three. The proportions were, by any measure, extravagant. They were also exact. Dior had trained as an architect before the war, and the garments read like elevations — load-bearing seams, cantilevered hips, a structure you could measure with calipers. He was backed by textile magnate Marcel Boussac, who had both the capital and the mills. Within two years, Dior's atelier was producing more than a thousand pieces per collection. By 1950, the house accounted for half of France's couture exports.

What Dior understood, and what his contemporaries perhaps did not, was that postwar Paris needed a new luxury script. Not the languid, bohemian chic of the interwar years, but something more formal, more architectural, more demonstrably made. The New Look was a thesis about craft at a moment when craft had been subordinated to utility. It was also, one suspects, a thesis about gender — a return to a silhouette that required assistance to put on, that could not be worn while driving a truck or working a lathe. Whether that reads as reactionary or simply as a pendulum swing depends on where you stand. What is not debatable is that it worked. Dior became, within five years, the most commercially successful couture house in Paris.

Saint Laurent and the pivot inward

Christian Dior died of a heart attack in 1957, at fifty-two, while on holiday in Italy. His successor was Yves Saint Laurent, then twenty-one, who had been working as Dior's assistant since 1955. Saint Laurent's first collection for the house, shown in January 1958, was called Trapeze. The silhouette was looser, younger, less structured. Hemlines rose. Waistlines dropped or disappeared. The French press received it warmly. Dior's American clients were less convinced.

Saint Laurent lasted at Dior for six collections. He was conscripted into the French Army in 1960, suffered a nervous breakdown during basic training, and was discharged. By the time he returned to Paris, the house had replaced him with Marc Bohan. Saint Laurent would go on to open his own maison in 1961, backed by his partner Pierre Bergé, and the rest is a separate story. But his brief tenure at Dior is worth pausing over, because it marks the first time the house had to reckon with a question it would face repeatedly: what does Dior mean when the man himself is gone?

Bohan's answer, across three decades as artistic director, was continuity. He returned to the codes — the Bar jacket, the A-line, the controlled volume. He was not an innovator in the way Saint Laurent became, but he was a steady hand. Under Bohan, Dior remained commercially dominant without setting the critical agenda. The house became, in effect, a custodian of its own past. Which is not a criticism. Custodianship, done well, is a discipline. It requires knowing what to preserve and what to let fall away.

Galliano, Simons, and the question of authorship

When John Galliano arrived at Dior in 1996, he arrived with a mandate to make noise. His first haute couture show for the house, in January 1997, was staged at the Grand Hôtel and featured models in corsets, crinolines, and headpieces that looked like they had been lifted from a Hieronymus Bosch painting. It was theatrical. It was excessive. It was, depending on your tolerance for spectacle, either a brilliant reimagining or a category error.

Galliano's Dior was not Dior's Dior. The silhouettes were historicist, but they referenced the eighteenth century as much as the 1940s. The palette was darker. The shows became events — not presentations of clothes but narratives, complete with sets, choreography, and a level of production design more commonly associated with opera. Commercially, it worked. Galliano's tenure coincided with the expansion of Dior's ready-to-wear and accessories lines, and the house's revenues grew accordingly. But the work was divisive. Critics who admired Galliano's imagination at his own label sometimes found the Dior collections overwrought. The question, never quite resolved, was whether he was interpreting the house or replacing it.

Raf Simons, who took over in 2012 after Galliano's departure, offered a different answer. Simons stripped back the theatre. His first collection, shown in July 2012, featured clean lines, minimal embellishment, and a colour palette of white, grey, and pale pink. The set was an installation by artist Sterling Ruby. The silhouette was recognisably Dior — nipped waist, full skirt — but the effect was cooler, more cerebral. Simons lasted three and a half years. He left, he said later, because the pace was unsustainable. Dior produces eight collections a year. Simons is a designer who works slowly.

Maria Grazia Chiuri, who succeeded Simons in 2016, is the first woman to lead the house. Her work is more explicitly political than her predecessors'. Her second show opened with models wearing T-shirts that read "We Should All Be Feminists," a phrase borrowed from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. The clothes themselves are softer than Simons', more romantic, more concerned with movement. She has reintroduced elements of folk dress — embroidered blouses, pleated skirts, flat shoes — into a house that once made its name on stilettos and corsetry. The critical response has been mixed. Some find the work compelling. Others argue it lacks a clear point of view. What is undeniable is that under Chiuri, Dior has remained commercially ascendant. The Lady Dior bag, the Book Tote, the Saddle — these are not new designs, but they have been re-marketed with precision, and they sell.

What remains

There is a photograph, taken in 1957, of Christian Dior fitting a jacket on a model in his atelier. He is kneeling, one hand adjusting the hem, the other holding a pin. The model stands very still. Dior's face is in profile, concentrated. He looks, in that moment, like a tailor. Which is what he was, before he was a name.

The house today is a global entity. It is owned by LVMH. It has boutiques in sixty-nine countries. It produces perfume, cosmetics, watches, jewellery, menswear, childrenswear, and homeware, in addition to the ready-to-wear and haute couture lines. The annual revenue is north of six billion euros. Whether any of that would surprise Christian Dior is hard to say. He was, by all accounts, a pragmatist. He understood that couture was a loss leader, that the real money was in licensing and fragrance. He died wealthy.

What he left behind was not a style, exactly, but a set of proportions. The idea that a garment could be engineered. That luxury could be structural, not decorative. That a jacket, properly made, could hold its shape on a hanger for fifty years. Walk through the Dior retrospective at the V&A, or the permanent collection at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, and what you see is facture. The way a seam runs. The way a pleat is set. The way a collar stands without support. These are not romantic gestures. They are decisions made by someone who knew how cloth behaves under tension, and who had the resources to see those decisions through.

The mannequin in the museum still wears Bar. The shoulders still slope. The waist is still the diameter of two hands. You cannot touch it, but you can walk around it, and if you do, you will notice that the back is finished as carefully as the front. No one would see that in a photograph. But the woman wearing it would know. And perhaps that, more than the silhouette or the fabric or the name, is what Dior understood: that luxury is the thing you feel against your skin, not the thing someone else sees from across the room.