Why It Matters That Melania Wore Dior in Paris Last Week
To an American in Paris, Bastille Day feels joyously familiar — a holiday so like our own Fourth of July, commemorating an 18th-century revolution with summer picnics, parades, and fireworks at twilight. To take part in this celebration with the French is to feel our countries’ centuries-old friendship, our shared commitment to democratic values, our mutual casting off of despotism, our common modernity.
Not this time, however. The Trumps’ Bastille Day visit distinctly dimmed that warm recognition of shared values. And as it so often does, fashion can help us understand politics.
For her visit to France, Melania Trump wore a striking red Christian Dior suit, with a big skirt and tightly buttoned waist. It was lovely, and also telling. Dior (along with the talented designers who have helmed his company since his death) is the subject of a vast retrospective this summer at Paris’s Musée des Arts Décoratifs, and Mrs. Trump clearly honored the iconic designer with her choice. But the Dior style telegraphs a very particular, 1950s vision of womanhood (as did the First Lady’s bouffant updo), which resonates with the state of American politics today.
“Christian Dior: Designer of Dreams,” is a crowd-pleasing, glamorous blockbuster, attracting thousands daily. Museum visitors gasp as they look up at spectacular garments often displayed on tiered platforms rising up to soaring marble ceilings: wasp-waisted ball gowns with billowing skirts, cocktail dresses encrusted with gemstones, structured wool suits with corseted jackets and skirts flaring stiffly over crinolines. The show is an extravaganza of gorgeous, dated impracticality. And that was the point.
Dior’s retro, hourglass, exaggeratedly feminine silhouette, known paradoxically as the “New Look,” represented a post-war rebound for fashion gender roles, a return to a restrictive, antiquated style. It reshaped the body with structured fabric carapaces consisting of massive skirts, tightly nipped waists, petticoats, rigid brassieres, and other encumbrances. The clothes were made of the most sumptuous, costly materials imaginable — shimmering silks, lush velvets, feathers, fur, jeweled embellishments — and in such huge quantities that some gowns made it challenging even to pass through a doorway.
After the misery of war, such extravagance felt restorative to many, a return to Parisian luxury and leisure. But Dior’s vision also represented a backlash against the streamlined modern looks and liberated lifestyles many women had embraced during World War II, when so many had entered the workforce for the first time, replacing the men gone off to fight.
When the war ended, though, President De Gaulle told women to stop working, go home, and “make French babies.” Dior reinforced that retrograde directive with his impractical, constraining clothes, which seemed better suited to royalty of centuries past than to independent women of the 20th century. The show at Les Arts Décoratifs overtly acknowledges Dior’s royalist nostalgia, juxtaposing some of the most lavish gowns with 18th-century portraits of noblewomen dressed in oddly similar garb.
To drive home this connection between the 1950s and the 1700s, curators have even recreated the famous Hall of Mirrors at the Chateau de Versailles, the ornate gallery where French nobility once paraded their finery. Here, in this latter-day Versailles, a timed light projection periodically bathes everything — dresses, art, and spectators — in a shower of shimmering golden discs, gilding even vision itself for a few moments.
The point is clear: Gorgeous as they were, Dior’s designs were saturated with a yearning for a mythic past when aristocratic women molded their bodies into exaggerated, ornamental, nearly immobilizing shapes — a past sanitized of less pretty realities (like the starving peasants, for example). It’s fine to don gold-colored glasses for a few hours while swooning over the Dior show. Such royalist nostalgia can live comfortably in a Paris fashion museum; in the United States, however, it lives in the White House.
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