Christian Dior Couture Spring 2014

Intimacy. Reality. Those words figured prominently in a conversation with Raf Simons before he showed his Christian Dior haute couture collection at paris fashion week on Monday afternoon. “I was thinking about taking the theatrical out and taking it more into reality,” Simons said. “As a designer, you have a responsibility to do both — to trigger her fantasy with the show, but give her the reality as well.”

That’s another way of saying that couture should feel modern — or, perhaps useful is a better word – without sacrificing the craft and quality essential to the genre, a way of saying that deliriously rich women need clothes that function, too. It’s a point Simons has striven to incorporate into the Dior vernacular (ever so stealthily at first) for several seasons. He’s a modernist at heart.

Simons described this show as honoring the connection between the women who make the clothes, the gifted artisans of the Dior atelier, and the women for whom they work, the clients. He sees that connection as one of intimacy, here expressed in a mood of graceful calm. Simons showed within a meandering “salon” — a curvaceous white enclave described in the show notes as “a radical female gesture,” though it looked like a Sixties Space Age girl cave — and not accidentally.

At the collection’s best, unfettered (though not always simple) charm prevailed. This swung archival Dior in relaxed takes on the Bar jacket and, more surprisingly, Courrèges/Paco Rabanne in trapeze shifts. Yet Simons eschewed his inspirations’ typical structure for softness, cutting light fabrics in clean, breezy shapes. His primary decorative motif: repetitive patterns – circle, eye, heart — embroidered onto the fabric, half of each shape cut out and often sewn with jewels for a 3-D effect.