Dior and I

"Dior and I" (2014 release from France; 90 min.) brings a close-up look at the fashion house of Christian Dior as it exists today. As the documentary opens (in 2012), the CEO of Christian Dior introduces a new creative director to the staff, a Belgian guy named Raf Simons. Raf is new to the "haute couture" as his background really is in "pret-a-porter" (ready to wear) and mostly for men on top of that. So this is a daring choice, and not one without risks. On top of that, Raf only has 8 weeks to come up with a new collection. And as if that isn't enough, Raf's use of French is okay but not fluent (he hails from Dutch-speaking Antwerp, Belgium, home of many other notable fashion designers). How will Raf do? Will his first collection be a success? To tell you more would spoil your viewing experience, you'll just have to see for yourself how it all plays out.

Couple of comments: first, this is the latest documentary from writer-director Frédéric Tcheng, who most recently brought us the delightful "Diane Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel". Second, the challenges that Raf Simons is facing are significant from the get-go. Not only because of the ridiculous time constraints (normally a new collection gets started on 4 to 6 months out, not 8 weeks), but also because of Simons' personality, which isn't the easiest, and his transition to designing haute couture for women, rather than pret-a-porter for men. Along the way, we get to know many other characters, including Pieter Mulier, another Dutch-speaking Belgian who came with Raf and is his trusted right-hand man, and of course the French atelier workers. The tension builds up as we get closer to the deadline for presenting the new collection. Watching how Raf deals with the pressure on the day of the collection's premiere, that alone is worth seeing this documentary for.

I recently saw this at the Landmark E Street Cinema in Washington DC. The matinée screening where I saw this at was very well attended, somewhat to my surprise to be honest. But I guess it just shows there really is an audience for a top-notch documentary on fashion. If this is your kind of thing, I'd readily suggest you check this out, be it in the theater or eventually on DVD/Blu-ray.

One of 2 docs available. Very inspiring. Fashion needs more. I'd like to do one. Director was great. I liked seeing Anna Wintour in a new light. His sensibility is fantastic. They come together beautifully. The synopsis is very true and well written. It is a very courageous work. The architecture in it is fascinating. It is well shot. It is,well lit. The sound is great. The behind the scenes abroad is awesome. They clearly got a lot of footage. The special events highlighted were fantastic. I got a deep view in.

This interesting documentary, directed by Frederic Tcheng (Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has To Travel), gives us a behind-the-scenes look inside the House of Dior, in Paris. It centers on the newly hired Creative Director Raf Simons, along with his right-hand man Pieter Mulier, as they prepare for Simons' first haute couture show, to be held in just 8 weeks.

Normally, a show such as this would take 4 to 6 months to prepare, so we'll see first hand the stress and uncertainties Simons will face as he gets to know the staff and the operations of the company. As he faces this extreme deadline, we will even be privy to his own personal concerns, including references to what certainly seemed like possible anxiety attacks.

The film is cleverly interspersed with old film clips of the founder of the company, the renowned designer Christian Dior, who died in 1957. Dior will also narrate these clips in a most haunting way, also exposing his personal doubts as he prepared for his first haute couture show many decades before.

Overall, although I admittedly know nothing about haute couture, I still found this documentary to be most interesting, as we see how what seems to be chaos, deadlines , and frenzied work lead in the end to a most amazing finished product.

Quite honestly, I am not a clothes person. My wife thinks that I live in the world of my peasant ancestors. The last thing I thought was, since I am a maven for the written word and the visual, that I'd give a turn looking at Frederic Chang's 'Dior and I'. If I didn't like it, fine, I'd stop the machine, and that would be the end of that. What I didn't expect: I was totally absolved by the arrival of Raf Simons as creative director 0f the House of Dior. An unlikely choice, it first appeared since he came from the ready to wear men's line of clothing to a culture that dressed women since 1947. But wiser heads prevailed, since Simons was a breath of fresh wind that swept away the dark clouds that Dior was under and with the departure of John Galliano for his anti-Semitic remarks. Had the brand fallen on hard times? Simons, in his brief three years at Dior, brought a vision of the 21 century to Dior that as Cheng's camera shows wasn't out of step with Christian Dior, as Cheng cuts in and out with clips and the words and at times the words of Dior on the feminine and dressing women to reflect her essence after seven years of war. And odd as it may sound, Simons' notions of beauty mirrored strangely and broadly with that of Dior's. What makes the arrival of Simons at Dior is how he and the team of Dior workers engaged in a felicitous dance of making Dior what it was a foremost house of haute couture. Cheng brings us closer to the heart of the House of Dior through the very people that sew, cut, fashion the ideas of Simons to the public as well as upholding the high standards of Dior and what that name means to the world. Under the rafters of the House of Dior on the Avenue Montaigne, we 'work' with the team Dior, some new others at the House since 42 years, as they labor right up to the last minute to bring the world of fashion Simons' first collection. As for him, he is more or less easy in working with people and encourages harmony to achieve his goals. He reads much, he goes to museums, and we even seen Dior's house painted in rose among gardens of flowers and emanating the feeling of spring. Although he is out of the world of the male, he grasps the ideal of making women beautiful, and finds colors and a freshness say in the paintings of Jeff Koons, the American painter who finds the beautiful in the most banal, as Simons' conceit to lift up a new palette in a Dior classicism but with a very modern twist. Simons has a temper for sure, but he is honest, the honesty of the Dutch burgher, which surfaces through the layers of haute couture. Cheng has done his best to show the choice of Simons wasn't something out of left field. In fact it was spot on and his choice by Dior's 32 percent share holder Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessey and Sydney Toldeano who presided over Dior's expansion was not only right but a stroke of good luck. 'Dior and I' is a work of love, it seems, and ought to be seen for fashion and the team that makes Dior, and has made Dior, a world class standard of high fashion.

This film is in some ways hilarious because the subject of the film, Raf Simons, has no idea that the film exposes him as a complete loser. He grew up in Belgium but does not speak French fluently. He is the newly appointed artistic director of Dior but does not know how to draw. So why is he the creative director of a prestigious fashion house? Apparently because he steals all of his ideas from artists (even Jeff Koons, the con artist par excellence!) and calls everything produced under his direction "sublime". What a fraud. What a loser. I should probably stop watching films about alleged creative geniuses. What a sham. What a scam.

Several famous people appear accidentally, as it were, including Anna Wintour, Sharon Stone, Isabelle Huppert, Donatella Versace, Dianne von Furstenberg, and Harvey Weinstein. The producers are probably now wishing that the latter had been absent on the day of the show...