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Double respect is due to John Galliano this season. First, it was he who entered the subject of lingerie at the top of fashion's agenda.
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Back in July, he showed his tailoring-with-underwear Christian Dior couture collection, and since then swaths of designers have being going at it with the visible frillies.
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Second, for ready-to-wear, he seized his advantage, melding a soft, delightfully thought-out version of the idea into a show with a forties film noir theme.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Galliano turned the skimpies—French lace-trimmed cami-knickers and satin teddies—into a contemporary version of this summer's shorts and playsuits, following through with a trousseau's worth of pretty boudoir baby dolls and tiny, fragile flowered chiffon dresses.
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Cleverly, the transparencies—such as a purple satin bra-and-knicker set, apparently seen through black tulle—were an illusion created by stretch, paneled underlayers, so that the pieces are actually slipped on in one.
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Stocking tops seen through the sheer panels in a copper lamé dress, and bras and panties glimpsed under a semitransparent tiered blue gown, were actually shadows stitched into underslips.
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By night, the glamour was amped up even further, as Galliano put his heroine into a flesh pink corset and a long draped mint green sequin-sprinkled skirt, a Chantilly-smothered basque and black ruffled skirt, and a vamp red satin gown.
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