This Dior Collection Is the Best News All Month

Glory be to the heavens, and all the post-“All is Full of Love” androids Raf Simons has channeled for Dior’s 2015 Pre-Fall collection. The entire month of December has been a party platter of shit sandwiches served ice cold, but Raf (first name basis, and what) reminds us that the holiday season is a magical time, full of sparkling lights, snow falling on cedars, and well-appointed replicants in sequined turtlenecks.

I don’t really go in for things like Pre-Fall and Resort from a writerly perspective. I love to look but I find the eighty-leven runway seasons exhausting as both a fashion fan and a “consumer.” (Plus what the fuck is a “pre-fall”?) I also think that all these additional collections from the big-name, big-money houses diverts attention from comparably smaller runway events, and fashion weeks in less-celebrated but often more creative cities like Copenhagen, Cape Town, and México City. So I’ve been paying attention this go-round, but not inspired to gushing and fainting until RIGHT NOW.

Style.com reports that the runway for this show was soundtracked by clips of Harrison Ford dialogue from Blade Runner: you had me at hello. There was a sense of futurism in the materials, the draping, and the beauty looks. The blips of eyeshadow above and below the models’ lids gave the effect of slightly scary mechanical dolls, which is definitely an aspirational statement for 2015. Mechanical dolls are the new witches. There was an element of mod, but not really in a formalist sense—more so as a throwback to Christian Dior, and the hand he had in creating the chicest ’60s designs. (There was, as ever, an updated bit on New Look, in the form of loose-waisted A-line dresses in leather, with zippers. Give me those chartreuse boots, now.)

Even as he invoked space and rigidity through perfect lines and tight, practical double-braids, it still seemed like a fever dream on comfort planet. These are clothes as glimmering as pretty as you’d want to be, but are still extremely wearable for hours on end, their silhouettes fitted yet forgiving. The silver sequins laid on necks and limbs like something to molt, slithery and tantalizing.

Of course, if Blade Runner was in the soundtrack, you know he was thinking about Johanna Cassidy’s iconic raincoat, and he offered a more practical, less clear take on the slicker—or maybe a play on the dark, detective trenches worn by Ford and Rutger Hauer. Simons told Style.com, “I tried to imagine a woman who was very much into the language of Dior, but she also has her garden, and she has her boyfriend with a motorcycle in the city, or she’s with her kids by the sea, or out with her dogs.” Whatever whatever, maybe. Can you imagine, though, anyone wearing these clothes without imagining she’s a magical princess from an automaton future? What a treat for a time in which the world of fantasy is looking better and better.