The gown designed by Hollywood costumer Jean Louis for Marilyn’s ‘Happy Birthday Mr. President’ performance at Madison Square Garden in 1962 has inspired Anthony Vaccarello’s ready-to-wear Fall 2024 collection for Yves Saint Laurent, as Mark Holgate reports for Vogue – but while Marilyn’s sequinned, flesh-toned dress merely hinted at nudity, Vaccarello has stripped away that illusion…
“Almost the entirety of Vaccarello’s 48-look collection was transparent. And all made from, I kid you not, the same fabric that’s used for tights. (I am British, and simply cannot conjunct panty and hose into one word. It sounds awful. Sorry.)
If you’re at all interested in fashion (and the fact you’re on Vogue Runway reading this says you are) or you’ve ever scrolled through Instagram (I know: constantly), or you’ve made your own tally of who won the red carpet, then you will be all too aware that transparency has become a major, major thing in the last few years. That it is the result of all sorts of complicated interactions between a generational embrace of body positivity, celebrity one upmanship, and a narcissistic show-offy display of one’s God (or Ozempic) given body. Every time it turns up, it’s like some kind of race to see who can bare what little is still left to bare, that it has gone as far as it surely can. Hasn’t it?
Then along came Anthony Vaccarello, who turned transparency on its head, in part by giving a nod to Monsieur Saint Laurent’s own tangle with the transparent, when back in 1966 he designed a sheer blouse to much clutching of pearls. (Vaccarello had also been thinking about Marilyn Monroe in her iconic Jean Louis dress to sing JFK happy birthday in 1962.) What Vaccarello did was imbue his collection with that absolute and once radical chic, and slyly comment on how banal transparency has become in our culture, and at the same beat, seeing it anew.”
While Marilyn’s ‘birthday dress’ was the starting point for YSL, Maria Grazia Chiuri’s latest collection for Christian Dior evokes the glamour of her twilight years, as Naomi Pike reports for Elle.
“A sense of nostalgia is permeating the moodboards across all four fashion cities and for Chiuri, it was a look to the 1960s for her AW24 collection, with the notes saying it was the time when ‘fashion left the atelier to conquer the world.’ Notably, for the house of Dior, it was the time of Miss Dior, which became a clear point of inspiration as the motifs were emblazoned across the wardrobe of modish clothes to become the show’s central tenet.
In notes provided by the house, Saint Laurent explained that Anthony Vaccarello had, like his predecessors, looked to Marilyn Monroe’s ‘naked’ dress (also worn in the 1960s) for inspiration, adding that: ‘An unsettling ambivalence cuts through the looks. Puncturing the propriety of feminine artifice, ephemeral lightness turns out to be an illusion: can purity be provocative?’
A sense of the Swinging Sixties was most notable in the opening looks at Dior, where modish mini skirts were worn under trench coats and styled with knee-high boots as you might expect, moving through to geometric patterns that spoke of the decade’s design eye, worn over tunic tops and flares or prim skirt suits … As the A-listers that assembled will be pleased to see, Chiuri’s seasonal insistence wasn’t too closely fixated on daywear. Here was a closing run of gowns that the Oscars’ invitees could gladly call upon.”
The Marilyn Report 