First came the glass condo towers, then came Whole Foods, and now here’s Christian Dior.
On Wednesday night, Dior hosted more than 900 guests at the Brooklyn Navy Yard for its 2015 cruise collection. Some came by car, and many arrived, at the house’s recommendation, by free ferries emblazoned with the Dior logo and free champagne. Stars came too, with Rihanna, Marion Cotillard and Maggie Gyllenhaal all in the front row.
“My driver came to pick me up like an hour and a half early,” said Gyllenhaal. “And then I was like, wait, it’s at the Navy Yard? We can leave in an hour.”
She was fairly certain she hadn’t been to a resort show before. “I don’t really know the ins and outs of the fashion season,” she said.
Who could blame her, because what is a fashion season anyway? A Dior show ... in Brooklyn ... in May? In the ever-widening fashion calendar, the cruise runway show has become very important to the house. And it was especially important to show in New York, with a legion of editors and buyers in town in an already supersize week that included the Costume Institute gala and the Frieze art fair.
This was Dior’s biggest resort show ever (by attendance, though the collection had a whopping 66 looks too). It has hosted previous resort shows in New York — in office buildings and at Guastavino’s restaurant — but those shows never had more than 200 attendees. Last year, Dior staged a runway resort show in Monaco (attendance: about 600).
For the biggest houses, this is becoming a trend. Louis Vuitton will host its first-ever runway cruise show next week at the Prince’s Palace of Monaco. And Chanel — a rival, which probably has something to do with Dior’s interest in these incipient spring runway extravaganzas — is showing in Dubai, UAE, next week, and has previously held resort shows in far-flung locations such as Singapore and Venice.
“Everybody is looking at the cruise collection as important as the summer collection,” Sidney Toledano, the chief executive of Dior, said in an interview from the house’s boutique on 57th Street. “Maybe even more important in terms of buying.”
Dior flew in hundreds of people, Toledano said. That included putting the designer, Raf Simons, up at the Pierre, and flying in his studio, the atelier, a visual merchandising team, international executives, buyers and merchants.
Inside the Duggal Greenhouse at the Navy Yard, the set featured an enormous mirrored wall overlooking a stage that was elevated about 16 feet to provide a view of the somewhat distant Midtown skyline.
“I like the idea of having the view of Manhattan instead of the other way around,” Simons said after the show. And the river. He really wanted the river.
“Raf likes flowers and he likes water,” Toledano said.
For Simons’ first couture show in July 2012, 1 million fresh flowers were ordered to line the walls. In the documentary Dior and I, the Vogue editor Anna Wintour tells Simons, upon entering that show: “I guess you didn’t have any budget issues.”
The same applied here. Male models dressed in Dior sailor uniforms greeted guests, armed with never-ending champagne and orange juice. Before the show, a throng of editors and clients drank and smoked outside, surrounded by a whiff of foul odour that quite possibly came from the East River. (Welcome to New York!) The ferries, which left Manhattan every 10 minutes, made for a much easier commute than the traffic-jammed headache that was the February Alexander Wang show, which was also here. Later on Wednesday night, Dior hosted a four-hour open-bar party at the Top of the Standard.
One of the reasons for the free-spending: resort sells.
“We will deliver at the end of October, you see, and we will be selling this collection up until May,” Toledano said. “It’s long. The summer collection will be presented in early October. The time is shorter.”
In other words, these clothes will be on the floors longer. And the collection was appropriately commercial, especially by Simons’ standards.
“Resort collections are obviously where you take care of the reality aspect of fashion,” Simons said. “I like to see my clothes worn.”
It will also provide fodder for a relatively fallow period for magazines.
“This is a costly endeavour,” the Marie Claire creative director Nina Garcia said at the show. “Not every designer can afford to put on a show like this, but for editors, it’s important. We have three months in November, December and January when we need to work with these resort clothes. For those three months, this is where our inspiration is going to come from.”
The customer wants it, and the giant Dior cruise show, wherever it is next year, is here to stay.
“The customer is demanding it,” Toledano said. “People want more fashion, and they want more newness.”
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