Dior reinvents Lewis Carroll’s Alice for the Brat era at Paris fashion week
Dior reinvents Lewis Carroll’s Alice for the Brat era at Paris fashion week
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Designer Maria Grazia Chiuri borrows from Dorotea Tanning’s surrealist paintings for her runway show. The new year has its first new muse: “Punk Alice”. At Dior’s haute couture show in Paris, Lewis Carroll’s feisty heroine got a 21st century makeover. Imagine Alice, she of Wonderland fame, but in her Charlie XCX-inspired Brat era and with a wardrobe handmade by the finest seamstresses in Paris. There you start to get the picture.
![[A model presents one of Maria Grazia Chiuri’s creations]](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/b2ab1c44c84c6c7180a4735d5d522a55b28af284/0_84_5872_3523/master/5872.jpg?width=445&dpr=1&s=none&crop=none)
A snowy white cross-backed lace pinafore dress was worn with a quivering black silk mohican headdress. Alice’s striped stockings were reimagined as lace-up leather gladiator boots. Her frothy skirt became a birdcage crinoline, her girlish ribbons were knotted dog collar-tight at the throat. In the front row, Pamela Anderson smiled beneath a dotted black veil, and Venus Williams was resplendent in tightly coiled braids. A fantastical landscape featuring lions in feather headdresses and plants that sprouted eyes as well as blooms was embroidered all over the walls a stage set in the garden of the Musée Rodin.
![[A model on the runway in Paris]](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/cab32a463ae7a34f320e2b9d8cd0306db913626c/0_378_5710_3428/master/5710.jpg?width=445&dpr=1&s=none&crop=none)
Escapism is a diplomatic answer to the tight spot in which many fashion designers now find themselves. Dior, where the designer Maria Grazia Chiuri has spelt out her worldview with feminist slogan T-shirts and advocated for diversity via a long-term collaboration with a Mumbai school for female craftworkers, has been at the forefront of a decade in which progressive principles became the mainstream in fashion.
![[Dorothea Tanning’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik]](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/89662737dca41889b95f8767f25397fbd0afbc5f/0_178_2446_1468/master/2446.jpg?width=445&dpr=1&s=none&crop=none)
With Trump’s second term shifting the tectonic plates of culture, fashion is feeling the pressure to fall into line. Asked backstage before the show whether politics had influenced this collection, Chiuri said it had not, but added that “fashion is a playground for the imagination. And in your imagination, you can create for yourself the world that you want to live in”.
