A Raf time with Dior
Director Frédéric Tcheng talks about his documentary on Raf Simons’ first haute couture collection with Dior at the Tribeca Film Festival.
It’s 2012, and Raf Simons, the freshly appointed artistic director of Christian Dior, is sitting in his atelier with his face in his hand. His face is a mixture of careful scrutiny and — is it panic? Disbelief? Worry? I’m not sure — as a model struts down towards him. It’s only a few weeks before his first haute couture show — not just as the new head honcho, but his first haute couture show ever — and we’re watching as he studies the first versions of his pieces.
The air in the room is thick with tension. Pieter Mulier, Raf’s right-hand man, stands close by, looking at the dress on the model but also watching Raf, waiting for his reaction. Seamstresses and other workers of the atelier mill around quietly. They barely had time to stitch the dresses together, and now they were on the models, waiting for judgment.
Finally, Raf smiles and gives his approval. “Sublime,” he says in French, and it’s like everyone in the room releases a sigh of relief — including us, even if we weren’t actually in the room. Where we actually were was in a New York cinema two years later, but the documentary we were watching was so vivid that we felt like we really were there.
We were watching Dior and I at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York, where Frédéric Tcheng, the writer and director, unveiled this film for the first time. Tcheng’s previous bodies of work include the famous fashion documentaries Valentino: The Last Emperor and Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has To Travel (a personal favorite), and now, he presents the goings-on behind one of the world’s top couture houses during a particularly turbulent time.
The fashion world was turned upside down when John Galliano, the famous head designer for Dior was fired from the house after a druken anti-Semitic rant in 2011. Who, indeed, could fill his crazy, usually high-heeled and thigh-high boots?
No one was expecting it to be Raf Simons from Jil Sander. It was as if Dior was looking for someone completely the opposite of Galliano, with his outlandish outfits, posse of famous clients, and his own runway walk during his fashion shows. Raf Simons is notoriously private and reserved, perpetually in subdued but well-tailored clothes, and known for his meticulous, minimalist menswear. And as soon as he was selected, he had two months — eight measly weeks — to conceptualize and pull a haute couture collection out of the shell-shocked House of Dior, a feat that normally takes four to six months.
As if creating the collection wasn’t stressful enough, he also had to learn how to work with Dior’s atelier. The first time he is introduced to the group, Raf looks shy and slightly overwhelmed and greets them in faltering French. It was like a first date; both parties were hanging back a bit awkwardly, but you could see the warmth and hope in their eyes.
And then, the work begins. Tcheng’s documentary is a delicious, mesmerizing, and pleasantly realistic behind-the-scenes look at what happens in a couture house. Despite the fact that we will probably never wear a couture gown from Dior, we are familiar — and sometimes, obsessed — with the elaborate fashion shows, the fabulous front row attendees, and finished products of haute couture, delivered straight to our screens through the Internet. The film remains glossy and graceful, but isn’t afraid to show the reality behind fashion: the stress, the long hours, and the conflict, and the costs.
It was definitely fascinating to see how the ideas come to life. Surprisingly, Raf doesn’t sketch. After doing a ton of research (visiting Christian Dior’s childhood home in Normandy, looking through the Dior archives, soaking up art from museums and from his computer), he collects a wealth of inspiration pieces, from images to fabric swatches. A mood board on super steroids; a mood filing system. He divides them into categories, and his designers sketch hundreds of looks for each one. Then Raf picks a handful of sketches, edits them a bit, and passes them down to the atelier, where the work is divided (one of the guys doesn’t even pick; he sits back laughing and tells the camera that the group always gives him the hard ones).
Quotes from Christian Dior’s autobiography and images and film clips from the House of Dior are interspersed throughout the documentary, and it’s shocking to see how the two designers thought so much alike. This was something that Tcheng came across when he was reading the Dior’s autobiography for research. “(Dior by Dior) was written like 55 years ago but I just felt that it was so genuine,” Tcheng tells us in the cinema, enthralled by the rich and intimate details by how Dior described his relationship with the work, his own image, the brand and the company. “When I met Raf, I sort of saw a lot of same dynamic,” Tcheng continues, and the more he read a lot of parallels started appearing between the past and the present. The same thing happens to Raf Simons when he started reading the designer’s memoirs. In the film, he reveals that he had to stop reading because of the uncanny parallel between Dior’s experience and his own. “It was weird,” he admits. “I thought I’d better not (continue reading), until the first show is done.”
There’s so much to be done anyway, and it’s not smooth sailing all the way. The team runs into several challenges. Inspired by Sterling Ruby paintings, Raf wants to use a technique called imprimé chaîne, which prints the threads before they are woven to re-create the artist’s prints on the fabric. Despite Paris being the home for haute couture, it’s not like there are corner stores for that everywhere here. In fact, someone mentions that only four engravers in France know how to do it, and surprise, surprise, they’re all busy. The fabric suppliers and members of the atelier exchange how-the-hell-are-we-going-to-do-this looks, but shrug and get it done anyway.
Another tense moment is when Raf discovers that Florence, the premier of the atelier flou (for dresses; her co-premiere Monique handles the atelier tailleur, for suits), is not present for the presentation of the pieces because she was called to New York by a client for an urgent fitting. The already-stressed Raf is not pleased, and walks into a private room, away from the cameras. But the cameras strain to see and hear what’s happening. Raf is seething, arguing with Dior’s haute couture director that when he wants to see the pieces, everything and everyone has to be there. “We can’t say no to clients,” someone tells him. “Well, you can’t say no to me,” he retorts angrily. Catherine, the director, is apologetic but firm. Dior is committed to providing personal service to their clients, and this particular client throws down EU350,000 every season. It’s a rare opportunity to see how the art and business sides of fashion do collide. Florence hurries in the atelier an hour later, and all is well. The pieces are seen and edited by Raf, and everyone gets back to work. It’s a flurry of cutting, beading, and even spray painting (Raf realized that a white tuxedo jacket would work better in black, but it was too late to make one from scratch) until show day.
Just like how Grace Coddington steals the show from Anna Wintour in the documentary about Vogue The September Issue, the members of the atelier are an absolute joy and discovery to watch, especially Florence and Monique. They’re a group of warm, cheerful and hard-working people behind all the glitz, glamour, and hundreds-of-thousand-euro gowns. “Not only are they some of the most dedicated and hard-working artisans that I’ve ever met — some seamstresses have a two-hour commute to come to Dior’s atelier — but they are the most humble and humorous people,” Tcheng told V Magazine. They really give the documentary heart, in the same way I’m sure they give the House of Dior heart, too.
But it’s hard not to like Raf too, who sends the premiers flowers and hand-written notes, transforms clothes with a little fold here and another drape there of his own hands, asks a whole house to be filled with flowers for the fashion show to look like Jeff Koons’ Puppy, and yet seems terrified about talking to the press. “You can tell from the film that he has a complex relationship with his image,” explains Tcheng. “He’s very private and prefers to remain that way.” After seeing the film, Raf didn’t ask for any changes, but he did tell Tcheng he almost asked him to take the “you can’t say no to me” scene out. “But then I thought you know what, if it happened, it happened. No point lying about it,” he said to the director.
On the day of the fashion show, Raf sits on the rooftop of the private house they rented for the show, practically paralyzed and in tears. No wonder he was nervous: the fashion industry’s best were wandering in, from designers (Diane von Furstenburg, Marc Jacobs, Alber Elbaz, Donatella Versace) to press (Anna Wintour, Carine Roitfeld, Suzy Menkes) to celebrities (Marion Cotillard, Charlize Theron, and even a then-rising Jennifer Lawrence). As the models line up, the members of the atelier gather backstage, excited to see the clothes make their debut. Raf joins them after a while, and they all watch as the show begins. It’s a superb show, and the pieces are magnificent. Raf definitely paid homage to Dior’s history with hints of Dior’ New Look in the pieces, but reinvented them in a more modern and wearable way. Christian Dior would not have disapproved. In fact, it’s another one of the designers’ parallels. They were both innovative designers, always looking to the future. “The past is not romantic to me,” Raf says in the film. “The future is romantic to me.” Meanwhile, Dior wrote in his autobiography that temperamentally, “I am reactionary, not to be confused with retrograde.”
Everyone’ backstage is hugging each other happily even before the show’s over, and Raf is in tears again. Even with six models to go in the finale walk, Raf dashes out to do his walk (perhaps to get it over with), and for perhaps the first time in the documentary, he is really smiling. Giddy, even. It’s so beautiful that Tcheng plays it in slow motion, like he wants to prolong it. Because as we all know, the fashion cycle is brutally fast, and before long he needed to design Dior’s ready-to-wear collection and present in just three months. Spoiler alert: it, too, was phenomenal. But now, more than simply admiring the clothes, we can appreciate them more because we know what goes on behind the haute couture house, and we can thank Frédéric Tcheng for that.
Before we all leave, someone asks Tcheng, “Are you wearing Dior?”
He grins. “I’m wearing Raf Simons.”
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For more information, visit diormovie.com or like Facebook.com/diorandimovie. Recently, the distributor Entertainment One Films has picked up North American rights to the documentary and is planning a theatrical release later this year.
