Beyond the Looking Glass: Inside Dior SS25 Haute Couture
- Hazel J
- Mar 13
- 4 min read
Designer Maria Grazia Chiuri looked to vintage Dior — and Lewis Carroll’s childhood classic — for divine inspiration.
Christian Dior’s childhood home shaped his favourite colours within couture: “very soft pink, combined with gray gravel.” This colour palette comprises Dior’s new Spring/ Summer 2025 haute couture collection. Designed under the artistic direction of Maria Grazia Chiuri, the first female director of the atelier (who is also rumoured to be leaving), the collection returned to themes of childhood and femininity, while also upholding Chiuri’s emphasis on the female gaze and devotion toward archival collections, creating a dialectic between past and future Dior.
To begin constructing the collection, Chiuri looked towards vintage Dior, particularly La Cigale from the Fall/Winter 1952 collection and the 1958 Trapeze line, the first collection designed by Yves Saint Laurent following Dior’s passing. She also turned to Alice In Wonderland for inspiration, and, in a romantic return to Rococo-esque aesthetics, I see a trapped child-woman reminiscent of Marie Antoinette.
Conceived by Christian Dior himself, La Cigale was manufactured with a blend of cotton, rayon, and acetate. Although the structure designed to hold the shape is unknown, it is thought to have a stiff petticoat supporting it. To create the iconic silhouette, Dior utilised and accentuated feminine shapes, unusual seams, and multiple pointed shapes, a direct contrast to the streamlined fashion popularised by the post-war style. For the 1952 Paris Collections report, former Vogue editor Jessica Daves nicknamed it the “Queen of Hearts skirt” which aligns with Chiuri’s nod to Wonderland. The silhouette of La Cigale can be seen in multiple garments for this year's Spring/Summer collection through the crinolines, panniers, and even the skirts of the dresses that lack them, too, through high-low and asymmetrical hems. Through the return to archival Dior, Chiuri is upholding her ”commitment to modernising the female gaze.”
In the Trapeze collection, Yves Saint Laurent echoed the 1920s waistless silhouette with narrow shoulders and bell sleeves as well as Dior’s 1947 A-line skirt. The afternoon dresses in the collection included centre-front buttons and bows, referenced by Chiuri. Peter Pan collars were included in the Trapeze collection, and while some of the garments showcased the collars, they’ve been reimagined to fit Chiuri’s vision. For Trapeze, Saint Laurent devised flattering and elegant designs, suiting Dior tradition — like his predecessor and mentor, it’s clear that Saint Laurent wanted to curate glamorous sartorial experiences that celebrate the female body. Writer Barbara A. Schreier noted that “... a woman had only to step into a Dior gown; the interior scaffolding did the rest.” The same can be said for Chiuri’s collection, which balances a streamlined structure with flounces, adding a sense of elegance throughout the garments.
Back in Wonderland, Chiuri borrows the concept of the looking glass as a metaphor for the studio’s mirrors. Suspending past and future in a dream-like aura, Chiuri yet again focused on femininity in fashion to contextualize the Dior brand. Using La Cigale’s silhouette, original moiré fabrics, and the Trapeze lines’ “baby doll” effect of obscuring the body beneath the garment, the Dior identity is sartorially reimagined with crinolines and panniers. The crinolines are modernised and visible, similar to the visible underwiring of the corsets, bustiers, and blouses. Some are layered with draped organza skirts, while others have the cage structures visible with cascading hand-crafted flowers and intricate embroidery, creating “entrancing effects of transparency and layering.” The adorning of flowers and bows, united with feathery organza pleats, ruching, and ruffles achieves a slinky, gliding effect upon movement. The flower branches that drape the skirt accentuate contrasting proportions and create different focal points, thereby “[yielding] to the most excessive fantasies and motifs.” The garments that lack the large crinolines have either a small embroidered skirt or tulle embroidered culottes with a fitted tailcoat to continue Chiuri’s proportion play.
While the colour scheme is primarily Dior’s favoured pink and grey, some designs feature a sobering black, which helps to highlight the minutest of motions within the garments’ swing and foreground the fitted tailcoats. The longer dresses shine with burnished silver embroidery. The delicacy of the whimsy is juxtaposed against the organza feather mohicans, integrating a punky pastoral quality into the look. This “flower-woman” and “bird-woman” evoke Carrollian fairy gardens, elevating the outlandish contradictions within Wonderland. This metamorphosed return to childhood is playful and evocative, a continual “hide-and-seek.”; the lace-trimmed culottes, according to Chiuri, are the “buried memory of a child-woman capable of crossing as many boundaries as she wishes, adapting the world to her scale: immense or tiny.” The garments render these models as curious, careful child-women rediscovering who they are after falling through to Wonderland. In this sartorial fusion of girl and woman, it allows the child-woman a suspended, dream-like space to explore her soul, without expectation or perception.
In recent years, there has been a significant rise in design deconstruction, with corsets turned into shapewear and underwear into outerwear. Maria Grazia Chiuri is certainly following suit, continuing this trend with visible corsetry. Evoking a sense of neo-romanticism, she designs around the boning structures, accentuating them yet also heeding contemporary boundaries to create her own look suspended within and without. A significant element of the new line is the use of panniers, crinolines, culottes, and petticoats — underwear worn as outerwear. Certainly, culottes and petticoats, with their layers, can be experimented with and reinterpreted to transform the figure and clothing for a modern audience. Seeing these designs come to life makes me believe in the reclamation and resurgence of historical attire. Crinolines and panniers are slightly more difficult to refresh, but haute couture may start using these to create structure and silhouette, a la Jean Paul Gaultier or Simone Rocha.
Recently, at the Critics Choice Awards, Ariana Grande wore one of the pieces from Dior’s new collection and Leighton Meester wore a Dior gown reminiscent of the new collection’s colour palette, with visible corsetry, embellished with sequins, similar to the longer gowns — however floor-length, with multiple layers and much less structure. Luxury clothing brands and high street fashion may take inspiration from and transform crinolines and panniers into peplums to keep a structural design in evening wear.
Since succeeding Raf Simons in 2016, Maria Grazia Chiuri continues to prove herself as a designer reshaping the cultural zeitgeist of fashion. Chiuri revives classic silhouettes with beautiful aesthetics metamorphosed into Alice in Wonderland’s eternal child-woman. 🌀
Hazel J is an artist and freelance writer focusing on fashion, film, and literature. She can be found on Instagram @hazelaart.