Dior And I

Fashion fans will love this fly-on-the-wall doc about eight make-or-break weeks at the house of Dior, filmed in 2012 as newly-appointed designer Raf Simons puts together his first haute couture collection against the clock. The Belgian was hired after John Galliano was sacked for an anti-Semitic rant filmed on a mobile.

Couture is as elitist as fashion gets, bought by a few hundred super-wealthy women who don’t blink at spending the cost of a London flat on a few new season must-haves (prices typically start at £20,000). The pressure for minimalist Simons to succeed in the ultra-feminine world of Dior is intense.

His right-hand man Pieter is a charmer, winning over the army of Dior seamstresses in white lab coats who spend weeks lovingly hand-crafting a single dress and joke that the ghost of Mr Dior haunts the atelier. By contrast, the shy, buttoned-up Simons is not exactly Karl Lagerfeld in the charisma stakes, rather a better dressed version of the nihilists in ‘The Big Lebowski’. But his tears on the day of the big show are genuine. So, too, is his allergic reaction to all things celebrity: he looks like he’d rather be getting his wisdom teeth extracted than stand next to Sharon Stone on the red carpet.