Dior Noir and Vintage Couture

Wenda Parkinson in Christian Dior’s 1949 hussar-style velvet-and-wool tailleur and black-fox muff, in Paris

John Galliano showed his newest collection for Dior this week.
Very Dior, Very Noir, Very Lauren Bacall:

"Galliano said he found the cinematic cue while thinking about Lauren Bacall. "She was a great Dior client; there are amazing photos of her in the salon with Bogart. It was that and Arletty in Hôtel du Nord," he said. That central character—a provocative, smoldering femme fatale with a side-parted, over-one-eye hairdo and red lips—gave him free reign to script a wardrobe narrative. It started with abbreviated wartime trenchcoats, flipped through silver lamé dresses, arrived at a sequence in which the heroine is seen in her scanties, and then followed her out to make a drop-dead entrance in some nightclub or other."

I like very much.
Well, except for the tacky socks and I hope he has gotten the whole underwear as outerwear thing out of his system.

September's Vanity Fair had an interesting article that both fashionistas and vintage lovers will find interesting.

"With the house of Lacroix filing for bankruptcy, and Yves Saint Laurent gone, some fear that haute couture is finished. But Paris's fashion phoenix has survived world war, cultural revolution and economic meltdown, reshaped to fit the times. (that is a really poorly worded sentence, no?) Tracing its lineage- Worth, Poiret, Chanel, Dior and onward- Amy Fine Collins describes the current incarnation: spectacular shows accessible to millions on the Internet and a new global client base in the Middle East, India and China."

Which is true.
I just went to Style.com and saw a collection that I would have never seen before the advent of the Internet without traveling to Paris or London.
The article is an interesting read on the history of haute couture with a nice collection of vintage fashion photographs.

If you have time click though Vivienne Westwood's RTW, it is of course crazy awesome, but she really has some great tailored pieces too.