So much for austerity chic

It is a grim, gray period of recession - and the house of Christian Dior is sending out dresses bouncing jubilantly with meters of material. And no, this is not Dior's defiant New Look of 1947, but John Galliano's haute couture for summer 2009.

So much for austerity chic! The couture shows opened in Paris on Monday with "Let them eat cake" delirium in the face of global gloom. Yet the cakes were so delicious, so light, sweet and delicately made that you could do nothing but smile benignly.

Substitute a sugar rush of lacy collars, organza cornets and meringue-light crinolines served up on a blue and white delft plate patterned with tulips - and there you have the extreme fashion that Galliano sent out for Dior.

In straitened circumstances, was it mad? Yes, but it was magic.

"Something to make people dream," Bernard Arnault, chairman and chief executive of LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton and Christian Dior, said backstage, while predicting that the crisis would not begin to recede until the end of 2010.

Source: International Herald Tribune by Suzy Menkes