Maria-Luisa (dite Coré) by Dior

          I've been slighty obsessed with this dress for some time now. I can't even explain why. I remember when I saw it for the first time. It was some kind of illumiantion, I guess. It has been in my mind ever since. Now it's time for you to get obsessed too.

          This beautiful dress was designed by one and only John Galliano for House od Dior in 1998 (spring/summer). It was called "Maria-Luisa (dite Coré)". It's made of silk, synthetic, wool, metal and glass. In 1999 it has been given by Christian Dior Couture Paris to The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where you can still see it. Here's the museum description: 

          "In this design, John Galliano for Dior combined the elements of a robe à la française with the vast crinolined silhouettes of the mid-nineteenth century. The stomacher, open overskirt, and petticoat are expressly eighteenth century, but the huge wired cages that support the skirts over nine feet wide are constructed more like the hoops of the Second Empire than the discrete by comparison panniers of the ancien régime. While the eighteenth-century woman could at least sidle through a doorway, Galliano's beauties, because of the depths of their skirts, would have to torque and deform their hoops to squeeze their way through."