They say the best laid plans of mice and men often go awry. You might include horses, too.
What had been planned as a fairy-tale-like Dior cruise show at the Great Stables of the Domaine de Chantilly, complete with a performance by female Mexican rodeo riders, ended up being hit by a rainstorm that doused the models as they made their way around the semi-open venue.
Guests fared slightly better. A greeter held an umbrella over Isabelle Adjani as she arrived, wearing a vaporous blue dress and sunglasses — though by this point, the sky was a threatening shade of slate gray. Another stood guard in front of Bernard Arnault, the luxury titan who owns Christian Dior Couture, and his wife Hélène.
The show was scheduled to start at 8 p.m., though by 8:30 p.m., most of the seats remained empty. It took many guests close to two hours to make the 30-mile journey by car from Paris through Friday-night gridlock.
Organizers anxiously monitored the sky, amid reports that a storm was set to hit at 9:17 p.m. precisely. As a light rain began to fall, assistants regularly swept the catwalk dry with squeegee wipers. With an almost uncanny precision, the show finally began at — you guessed it — 9:17 p.m., just as sheets of rain started driving down.
Wearing embroidered black-and-white dresses custom-made by Dior, a team of eight Mexican escaramuzas valiantly strode out and started to perform their precision maneuvers. As they whipped through their high-speed horseback ballet, riding sidesaddle, they brought to mind a gang of modern-day Annie Oakleys.
The fearlessness of the sport taps right into Maria Grazia Chiuri’s love for strong women, a running thread in all her collections since she took over as creative director for women’s wear in 2016, marking her debut with “We should all be feminists” T-shirts in her show.
“The reason I like the escaramuzas is because they do something that is so macho — rodeo — in our vision, but they decided to do that in their traditional dresses which are so pretty, so feminine,” she said during a fitting at Dior’s ready-to-wear workshop in Paris.
But it all proved too much for Paris Jackson, who huffed out barefoot minutes into the show, having earlier asked two helpers to take off her high-heeled sandals. Whether the issue was animal welfare, or simply an extreme aversion to rain, was not clear.
It was her loss, since Chiuri sent out a beautiful collection that melded the finest of Latin American and European equestrian tradition.
Full riding skirts in dense embroidered motifs were worn “gaucha” style with crisp white shirts and black cravats. Ruth Bell, meanwhile, demonstrated how the English do rain: with a tan canvas trouser suit and a stiff upper lip.
Naturally, there were variations on the Saddle bag, the Aughts “It” bag that has become a vintage bestseller in recent years, and was unveiled in its modernized version as part of Dior’s fall collection shown in February.
While the Adelita dresses that the escaramuzas traditionally wear for charreada tournaments obey strict codes — starched petticoats are de rigueur — the versions that Chiuri showed on the catwalk offered a more relaxed take on the aesthetic.
Flared skirts in crisp light cotton, printed with muddy Toile de Jouy motifs or monochrome stripe patterns, were worn over cloudlike layers of tulle. Lace — a specialty of the region — appeared as graphic inlays or dense ruffles on dresses accessorized with wide black leather belts and riding boots.
Founder Christian Dior was fond of the material and its origin, christening an evening dress from his fall 1947 collection after Chantilly and its famous castle. But he was equally inclined toward channeling men’s tailoring, dressing women like Marlene Dietrich in his nip-waisted wool jackets.
On Chiuri’s mood board, two looks stood out. A 1948 design named Rodeo, featuring a long pencil skirt with flared panels inspired by cowboy chaps, inspired the bulging pockets on this season’s signature hourglass jacket, while draped skirts nodded to the 1951 Amazon dress, named after the French term for riding sidesaddle.
“I am really obsessed with this Dior look, Amazon, because it’s beautiful. In some ways, it’s a modern vision of the Dior Amazon,” she explained. “It’s important to look to the heritage, but it’s important to see it with the eye of the now, otherwise you are doing vintage or a museum piece.”
She delivered the newness in spades, pairing a sleek black jacket with a knife-pleated skirt, or working the look in glossy black leather, the skirt a marvel of openwork. “That was fabulous,” exhaled celebrity stylist Brad Goreski as the last model swept past.
He was right. But watching the outfits being pelted with rain, it was heartbreaking to think of the hours of painstaking craft that went into each one. More than that, it begged the question: why was there no plan B?
Granted, the logistics of staging the event in a historic site — the stables were built in the 18th century for Louis Henri de Bourbon, the seventh Prince of Conde — make last-minute changes a daunting prospect, but was it worth the risk?
With two more outdoor cruise shows set for the next few days — Louis Vuitton in Saint-Paul de Vence and Gucci in Arles — Friday’s experience should set alarm bells ringing with the organizers of those shows.
As the rain began to pool between the centuries-old cobblestones in the courtyard of the Chantilly stables, guests made a dash for the building’s great nave, an indoor space with majestic arches, for the after-party, where pick-me-ups included Don Julio tequila and Ruinart Champagne.
Flitting by, Dior chief executive officer Pietro Beccari tried to put a positive spin on events: “They say that when it rains, it’s good for business.”
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