Galliano models show their underwear

Not since Jean Paul Gaultier designed a rocket-cone bra for Madonna has a French fashion house made such a display of its underwear. John Galliano, the British couturier at Dior, sent his models out half-dressed yesterday in an haute couture show designed to pay homage to the women who first modeled the New Look styles of Christian Dior after the war.

Teaming bras with bubble skirts and lacy French knickers and garter belts with wasp-wasted jackets, Galliano made it look as if the models had been caught unawares - and that was the idea.

"I imagined the ladies backstage sort of making themselves up and someone saying the show has to start but they hadn't been really dressed. But the show had to go on," Galliano said backstage after the show at Dior's flagship store on the Avenue Montaigne.

As the Daily Telegraph's fashion editor Hilary Alexander writes today, the show provide a unique glimpse of what goes on beneath some of the fashion world's most exquisite designs - "a peekaboo parade of the gorgeous lingerie and underpinnings which create the famous Dior 'hourglass' silhouette."

Just in case any of Dior's well-heeled clients were anxious they might not be able to pull off the look themselves, Madame Catherine Riviere, head of haute couture at Dior, made it clear they would be able to order the jackets with matching skirts, skirts with matching jackets - and request that Galliano's sheer petticoats be lined. ·