Your bookshelf needs this definitive new Dior book

It’s all happening for Dior right now. 2017 marks the house’s 70th anniversary year, and it’s shaping up to be a busy one – as well as all the usual campaign releases and star-studded fashion shows, the brand opened an incredible (and enormous) exhibition of couture at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs. Last night in London, Dior celebrated the release of another project: a new book documenting over 180 collections from the past seven decades.

With an introduction and designer biographies by Alexander Fury, Dior Catwalk: The Complete Collections details every couture show from 1947 to 2017 as well as ready-to-wear starting with John Galliano in 1996. It covers the house’s historic beginnings (the 1947 New Look, the invention of the famous H, A and Y lines), the drama (the rise of the 21-year-old Yves Saint Laurent, thrown into the spotlight after his boss’s death in 1957) and the designers – all the way up to Raf Simons and Maria Grazia Chiuri. 

The highlight, though? It has to be the 250+ pages dedicated to Galliano. Sets don’t get more iconic than the Diorient Express train (AW98 Couture), and Pat McGrath’s beauty looks deserve an entire book of their own. As for the clothes – from the neon silk of the Matrix collection (AW99 Couture) to the twisted sexuality of Freud or Fetish (AW00 Couture) and the extravagant, Japanese-inspired fairy tale of Madame Butterfly (SS07 Couture) it’s fashion at its most theatrical and extravagant.

The book is published by Thames and Hudson – fashion fans may remember the release of a Chanel edition last year, which contained every collection by Karl Lagerfeld. We can only hope more are on the way.

Dior Catwalk: The Complete Collections is out now