Maria Luisa

 This dress, which is known as the Maria Luisa, is held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. 

‘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.’

The Maria Luisa Black Silk Taffeta gown by Galliano for Dior has got to be one of the most stunning gowns that have been made.