“More Dior than Dior” was the way that Christian Dior billed its spring summer haute couture collection last week. It was the leading major show of the Paris Couture Week, and proposed the first answer as to how the luxury fashion houses could provide an aesthetic response to the recession.

An profuse designer such as John Galliano was scarcely likely to present an austere, “credit crunch chic” collection, particularly as couture is about visionary, made-to-measure creations that showcase the skills of the fashion house and justify the price tag to the buyer. Instead, he returned to the essence of the Christian Dior label under its founder, then put his own exuberant historical variation on it.

Revisiting the roots of a brand is an conventional way to respond to hard times, and president and chief executive of Dior, Sidney Toledano, said that couture sales had seen “double-digit growth,” because Galliano had returned to “truly interpreting the Dior codes and the Dior cuts”. Consequently, the classic Dior profile of bar jacket of the late 1940′s, with its nipped-in waist emphasised by flared hips and a full skirt, was seen throughout the show. The amount of fabric used in Dior’s new look might have created outrage in post-war years, but the full skirts shown by Galliano last week made their iconic predecessors look almost skimpy.

The dreamy material of several of the dresses had an aristocratic feel – as if the wearer had successfully made a fairy-tale dress out of the curtains in her château … a sartorial echo for those couture clients whose finances aren’t recession proof after all.