Another of my recent holiday exhibition highlights, but for very different reasons.

Dior Illustrated: René Gruau and the Line of Beauty at Somerset House on the Strand was a titillating exploration of fashion illustration at its best. And it’s all there in Gruau’s original drawings, covering decades of fashion advertising and charting some of the great social movements of the 20th century. Sex, allure, jutting hip bones, bright white teeth, vermilion lips, emancipation, audacity, an Haute Couture lifestyle. A lifestyle completely out of the reach of most women and men, but one that was easily claimed, if only for a moment, with a whiff of Diorissimo or Eau Sauvage.

What is most interesting is the amount of bleed proof white correcting fluid Gruau used to create The Line of Beauty. Even a great illustrator relied on an artist’s little helper to get the line just so.

Nothing is perfect, I guess.

BDW