BRITISH TOUCH
For a month-long period, Harrods is celebrating Dior. And in an appropriate return for the homage, in the department store’s windows Dior is celebrating Her Majesty’s kingdom.With a generous dose of English humor, naturally !
As you were already well aware, Christian Dior held a great affection for England. Whether British elegance and humor, menswear fabrics and the great ball gowns worn by ladies, city cooking and countryside landscapes, everything on this side of the English Channel was attractive to him. There’s always been a little bit of England in the spirit of the Dior creations. And with Harrods giving over all its windows on Brompton Road to the house from Avenue Montaigne this month, Dior has imagined a London that’s been totally Diorized, as though there was always more than a hint of Dior in the heartbeat of England. Everything lends itself to the undertaking – Miss Dior, Lady Dior, right down to the very names of the house’s legendary creations!
And so we find Big Ben, the clock having become a Dior VIII Grand Bal. Further along, the cabins of the London Eye are Miss Dior bottles. And the Lady Diors take a stroll on Tower Bridge. Shoes get all over town on the roofs of the imperial buses. And the tartan motif makes an appearance on the house’s bags, or inside an umbrella, beneath a rather unorthodox London downpour of bottles of J’adore. As for the Crown Jewels, they’re made of miniature perfume flacons, as a scented homage to the Queen – the Imperial State Crown all in J’adore, the Scepter With The Cross in Poison, and the grand collar of the Order of the Garter in Miss Dior bottle stoppers. The mannequins are wearing the spring-summer collection by Raf Simons; in the windows, they might well be Dior-clad tourists, captured in key moments of their London trip. One caught posing among the guards at Buckingham Palace, another on a visit to the Palace of Westminster; others coming out of the Tube, London’s famous metro system; and another being escorted by the Harrods bear, the store’s symbol, dressed as a bobby, the nickname given to the city’s policemen. The phone boxes, the letter boxes, it’s all there! Down to the smallest detail.
Dior is celebrating this great Franco-British friendship until mid-April in the Harrods windows.
And it’s also all about the history and the creations of the house as seen through a British prism of the
kind of humor to which France is so receptive. And which appealed so much to Christian Dior.
Dior at Harrods
87-135 Brompton Road
Knightsbridge
London, SW1X 7XL, United Kingdom
