Dior Secret Garden Revisits Versailles Once More After J'Adore Campaign {Fashion Notes} {Perfume Images & Ads}
Versailles is getting quite a bit of traction these days in fashion circles. Chanel will present their next collection there. Dior did a perfume campaign for J'Adore last year in the Galerie des Glaces. The latest reason to showcase the castle is Dior fashion for the Fall 2012 collection. You can see after the jump how Dior went from a busy and bustling atmosphere capturing the headiness of a fashion collection for J'Adore to a much more dreamlike and pensive contemplation of the feminine form, more or less dressed and undressed. Model Daria Strokus stars in the commercial supported by Melissa Stasiuk and Xiao Wen Ju.
Music by Depeche Mode "Enjoy the Silence" is particularly good at drawing a bridge with the past, suggesting a space once inhabited by courtiers and by legendary figure Marie-Antoinette, now left empty, haunted by the souvenir of grandeur and supreme elegance...
It is reminiscent to us of the sensation of impermanence experienced in the movie The Last Emperor by Bernardo Bertolucci when the Forbidden City once the scene of so many passions is revisited as an innocuous museum.
Daria is Russian, but she looks so much like a typical English girl from the 60s-70s with her doll-like Polly Magoo makeup and porcelain complexion! The fashion is also very Mod. She is made to evolve like a swan inside and outside the Château. There are some cryptic moments in particular the way her face is filmed showing states of emotion which are slightly disconnected from the world around her. It suggests a mystical experience, a vision going beyond this world.
Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin directed the film.
See also the perfume commercial featuring Charlize Theron shot by Dior, actually Jean-Jacques Annaud, at Versailles. It's more gimmicky, with this featuring of a gallery of doubles from Hollywood. It has less atmosphere than "Secret Garden". It's what you do when you're bored and are trying to find an escape from boredom: Yeah! Doubles! At least with Secret Garden they are trying to relive the space.
