Bar jacket to ‘Singapour’ dress sketches: 5 highlights of UBS House Of Craft x Dior exhibition

SINGAPORE – No records of Christian Dior and Yves Saint Laurent visiting Singapore exist, but keen observers at a new fashion exhibition in town might spot haute couture designs by the two French titans inspired by the island.

Dior, founder of his namesake luxury fashion house, designed two Singapour dresses in the 1950s, the first a wide-collared, liberally floral frock.

His successor Saint Laurent followed with a sky-blue evening dress called Nuit de Singapour (Night in Singapore) in 1960.

Sketches and pictures of these obscure homages and more pepper the margins of the UBS House Of Craft x Dior show, running from Nov 21 to 23 at New Art Museum Singapore in Tanjong Pagar Distripark. Admission is free.

It showcases 37 photographs of archival Dior pieces, styled, contemporised and disrupted by co-creators Carine Roitfeld – former editor-in-chief of fashion magazine Vogue Paris – and Italian photographer Brigitte Niedermair.

Their witty appraisal of Dior’s 79-year-history includes six gowns, a crown and an early Lady Dior bag, flown in from the brand’s archives in Paris. Each piece represents the haute couture work – dressmaking at its most exultant and laborious – of one of Dior’s seven creative directors: Christian Dior, Yves Saint Laurent, Marc Bohan, Gianfranco Ferre, John Galliano, Raf Simons and Maria Grazia Chiuri.

Singapore is the first Asian stop of the photo exhibition, commissioned by Swiss multinational investment bank UBS for its global House of Craft campaign, a series celebrating elite craft. It debuted in New York in June.

Live craft demonstrations by Dior Atelier and panel talks by industry speakers, including Roitfeld and Niedermair, are also programmed for the weekend.

Here are The Straits Times’ top five highlights.

1. Christian Dior Bar jacket

The journey begins with the original Bar jacket, said to have signalled an end to wartime sobriety on its release in 1947. It appears here the way it was first presented – nipped-waist and full-hipped in a cream shantung, paired with a big black skirt, obviously unrationed in its yardage.

This womanly silhouette was immediately dubbed the “New Look”.

Every Dior designer since has put his or her own spin on the jacket.

Roitfeld suggests it got its name from the cocktail bar across the Dior offices that it was made to be worn in. She and Niedermair update the foundational suit with a naughty swop, trading the jersey skirt of 1947 for a figure-skimming latex skirt.

2. Yves Saint Laurent Beatnik jacket

Haute couture got a countercultural shock in 1960 when Saint Laurent launched his version of a motorcycle jacket – the first time any designer had so openly taken from youth culture. The black leather Chicago jacket – from the Beat collection, short for Beatnik – seemed to have more to do with Left Bank existentialism than the salon set, never mind that it was lined with mink.

On camera, this piece of fashion lore still looks fresh today. It is photographed here in modern relief with a pair of leggings, a pillboxy hat and a French bulldog on a leash. The breed was Saint Laurent’s favourite. He kept four successive dogs, all named Moujik.

3. Marc Bohan Afternoon dress

A black wool dress is the centrepiece of the Marc Bohan room. The bodice extends into a flared skirt made of loops, an unassuming shape easy to miss for the show’s more provocative exhibits. But a lingerer might find in it a quiet loveliness emblematic of Dior’s longest-serving and least-known creative director. Loiter, and the dress becomes urgently covetable, good on a 25-year-old and better on a 60-year-old.

Pictures of Bohan’s Jackson Pollock dresses, with prints recalling the American artist’s “dripping paint” series, and a camp leopard print vest show his range. Roitfeld and Niedermair style these punk, with interjections of black and hair teased high in their photos.

4. Lady Dior, the early years

A Lady Dior bag circa 1996 sits on a plinth in its inventor Gianfranco Ferre’s room. The iconic quilted bag was the first produced by the house and is still a classic today. Roitfeld and Niedermair have fun with it, upending the bag and fastening it to their model’s head with ribbons. She wears it like a bishop’s hat.

Around her neck are Christian Dior-era pearls, in a subtle conjoining of timelines.

5. John Galliano gets a dressing down

See the British designer’s latex Bar belt (circa 2009), his riff on the Bar jacket, in the flesh. Galliano lopped off the stiff top of the suit, leaving only the voluptuous bottom. Like the controversial designer, Roitfeld and Niedermair’s photos run with scissors, partly undressing models in some images to show the insides of Galliano’s couture work. Construction is construction par excellence, they say.

The most daring image pairs the original Bar jacket with an operatic red Galliano gown, half undone to reveal the pale corset underneath. Seen deshabille, the pooling train looks yet more eye-catching, like a volcanic pond at the model’s feet.

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Book it/ UBS House Of Craft x Dior

Where: New Art Museum Singapore, 05-03/06 Tanjong Pagar Distripark, 39 Keppel Road
When: Nov 21, 11am to 5pm; Nov 22 to 23, 11am to 7pm
Admission: Free with registration at

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Info: 

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