Dior and the Art of Dressmaking Impossibilities

As the Christian Dior show kicked off haute couture week in Paris yesterday, the crashing prices at the nearby Bourse felt a long way away. At the very top of this luxury market, confidence in the financial outlook remains high - for now.

At haute couture, fashion's most elite branch, where each piece is handmade to order and prices begin in five figures, the champagne is still flowing. The oligarch's wives and tycoon's daughters, who come to shop, are as yet unbowed by talk of credit crunches.

Yet haute couture is not quite as detached as it first seems. In a neat illustration of how fashion zeitgeist comes into being, this Dior show took inspiration from a painting echoed in a new Hollywood film starring Julia Roberts.

John Galliano, the British designer of Christian Dior, based this collection on John Singer Sargent's painting of Madame X, which scandalized Paris with its intoxicating portrait of female sexuality when it was shown at the Salon in 1884.

In Charlie Wilson's War, Joanne Herring (played by Roberts) has a portrait of herself in the style of Madame X displayed in her Texan mansion. Zeitgeist is not spun out of thin air after all.

When the painting was first exhibited, Sargent's not the one of Robert's character, one shoulder strap had been nudged provocatively off one shoulder - "One more struggle, and the lady will be free," suggested the Le Figaro newspaper at the time.

But the tease of swift undress is a sham: the gown worn in the portrait was fixed onto the body by a meticulously engineered waist-cinching whalebone corset. The flimsy shoulder straps were purely decorative. Yesterday's Dior collection was based on the same conceit: clothes that appear girlishly light and frothy, but are in fact based on serious sartorial engineering.

So the torso of a leopard-print ball gown appeared to be wrapped gently around the waist, when in fact the apparent softness concealed a heavy-duty corset beneath; a voluminous opera coat, puffed up and proud as a perfect yorkshire pudding, was fashioned out of silk stiffened and printed to resemble crocodile skin.

The art of pulling off dressmaking impossibilities with difficult fabrics is a tradition in haute couture as it showcases the skill of the designer. Cristobal Balenciaga, for example, liked to work in heavy, boiled wool because he knew no one else but him could fashion elegant silhouettes from this lumpish cloth.

While Sargent's Madame X wore unadorned black velvet, yesterday's Dior outfits came jewel box bright, each encrusted so densely with embroidery that the catwalk resembled a bowl of giant jelly babies, brightly colored and sugar-dipped. All the signature silhouettes of haute couture were featured: the cocoon-shaped coats, the mermaid-shaped dresses and the slender-sleeved peplum jackets. The parodic femininity of the tightly corseted, impossibly long-limbed shapes was emphasized in the virtuoso make-up: feather eyelashes and diamante eyeliner bringing together the aesthetics of the drag queen with the skill of the world's best make-up artists to stunning effect.