The Dior Newspaper Print: From Schiaparelli to John Galliano and Sex and the City

Époque Couture · Published 28 September 2026

Photo credit @alexandramalenaleclerc

On 11 September 2026, Alexandra Leclerc wore a Christian Dior newspaper-print dress by John Galliano from the Époque Couture archive to the Madrid Grand Prix. Cut in silk jersey and printed to resemble the pages of a newspaper, the dress comes from Dior's Autumn/Winter 2000–01 ready-to-wear collection, Fly Girl.

Leclerc styled the dress with a Lady Dior bag and black mules. More than 25 years after it first appeared, the newspaper print remains one of the most recognisable designs of Galliano's time at Dior, helped by its appearance on Sarah Jessica Parker as Carrie Bradshaw in Sex and the City.

But newspaper print did not begin with Galliano. Its history in fashion goes back much further.

Newspaper print before Dior

One of the earliest known newspaper-print garments is a cotton fancy-dress ensemble dating to around 1908, made using clippings from the London publication Black & White. It was costume rather than couture or ready-to-wear. A more direct precedent came in 1935, when Elsa Schiaparelli created a textile covered in real newspaper clippings about herself and her fashion house.

Schiaparelli later recalled that the idea came after seeing Danish fishwives wearing newspapers twisted into makeshift hats to protect themselves from the rain. Back in Paris, she commissioned a printed textile using press coverage of her own work. It was made into scarves, blouses, hats and dresses, and was also sold as fabric.

The idea was unusually modern: the press surrounding the designer became the design itself. Museums including the V&A and ASU FIDM Museum have since described Schiaparelli's newspaper print as a form of self-promotion and media branding.

Newspaper print appeared again during the paper-dress boom of the 1960s. Twiggy was photographed in a newsprint paper dress in 1967, while the Chicago Sun-Times produced its own promotional mini paper dress.

After that, the history becomes less clear. Newspaper and text-based prints occasionally appeared in fashion through the following decades, but many supposed examples from the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s are difficult to date or verify.

Then, in 2000, John Galliano brought the idea back to the centre of fashion at Christian Dior.

Les Clochards, January 2000

On 17 January 2000, Galliano presented Christian Dior's Spring/Summer 2000 Haute Couture collection at the Petit Palais in Paris. The collection became known as Les Clochards ("the homeless").

Galliano said that part of the inspiration came from his morning runs along the Seine, where he passed people sleeping rough. He also cited photographs by Diane Arbus, the paintings of Egon Schiele and the "Rag Balls" of the 1930s, where wealthy guests dressed as impoverished characters.

The 42-look collection opened with trousers printed with pages from the International Herald Tribune, including Galliano's own press coverage. Elsewhere there were shredded silks, distressed layers, singed-looking organdie and elaborate couture embroidery on clothes deliberately made to look worn or salvaged.

As with Schiaparelli decades earlier, the designer's own press had effectively become fabric.

The response was immediate and sharply divided.

WWD was relatively sympathetic, while couture client Mouna Ayoub reportedly reserved three looks and called the collection "genius" and "brilliant." Other reactions were far harsher. Maureen Dowd wrote about the show in The New York Times under the headline "Liberties: Haute Homeless," calling it "tasteless chic." French newspapers also questioned Galliano's decision to use homelessness as a source of inspiration.

The criticism soon moved outside the fashion press. Later that month, protesters gathered outside Dior's Avenue Montaigne boutique in Paris. Some arrived wearing bin liners and chanted that they had come for a casting for the "SDF look" (a reference to sans domicile fixe, the French term for someone without a fixed home). Riot police were called and the boutique temporarily closed.

Galliano rejected the idea that the collection mocked poverty and said he had never intended to make "a spectacle of misery." Dior framed the show instead around experimentation and creative newness.

Fly Girl, March 2000

Six weeks later, newspaper print appeared again.

Christian Dior's Autumn/Winter 2000–01 ready-to-wear collection, Fly Girl, was shown on 2 March 2000 at the Théâtre National de Chaillot in Paris.

The mood could hardly have been more different.

Galliano imagined a new generation of extremely wealthy young women and spoke at the time about girls who had "made mega fortunes on the internet" and "weren't afraid to show their wealth." Missy Elliott, Foxy Brown, Mary J. Blige and Lil' Kim were among the women he cited as references.

The 60-look collection was shown on a 100-foot gold-mirrored runway and was full of conspicuous luxury: sable, mink and chinchilla coats, leather trench coats, bleach-streaked denim, ostrich leather and bias-cut dresses.

Newspaper-print silk appeared across dresses and slips. One version of the fabric was called "Dior Daily News," built around Galliano's own image and press coverage, reportedly a response to the criticism he had faced over the January couture show. Sotheby's has since described the print as trompe-l'oeil newsprint reflecting "Galliano's own experiences in Paris and his fascination with media culture."

The print had moved from the context of Les Clochards into a collection built around wealth, celebrity and the new internet age.

There is also a longer fashion history behind the idea. Schiaparelli had used her own press coverage as textile in 1935, while Galliano's Dior print similarly turned the designer, the fashion house and their media image into something that could be worn.

The Dior newspaper dress and Sex and the City

Later in 2000, the print reached an audience far beyond the runway. Sarah Jessica Parker wore a Christian Dior by John Galliano newspaper-print dress as Carrie Bradshaw in Sex and the City, Season 3, Episode 17, "What Goes Around Comes Around." The look became one of Carrie Bradshaw's best-known outfits and helped turn the Dior newspaper dress into one of the defining fashion pieces associated with the series. The actress wore the design again a decade later in the 2010 film Sex and the City 2. (See Sotheby's catalogue entry and 29Secrets' account of the episode for further detail.)

By then, the print had taken on a life well beyond the original Dior collections. It had become closely associated not only with Galliano, but with Carrie Bradshaw and the fashion culture of the early 2000s. Examples from the collection have since appeared at auction and entered important private collections.

Dior revisits the newspaper print

Dior returned to the print almost two decades later. For Dior Men Spring/Summer 2020, shown in Paris in June 2019, Kim Jones revisited Galliano's newspaper design. The new version was lighter and more muted, with the original print reworked in white on sheer fabric and Galliano's face removed.

Rather than simply reproducing the 2000 design, Jones treated it as part of Dior's own archive, an acknowledgment that Galliano's newspaper print had by then become part of the history of the house.

Other designers have continued to revisit newspaper imagery in different ways, from Jeremy Scott's tabloid-inspired Moschino Fall/Winter 2019 collection to Jean Paul Gaultier's recurring "Journal" print. But the Dior version remains particularly recognisable because of the unusual overlap between runway history, controversy and popular culture.

The Époque Couture dress

The Époque Couture archive includes a Christian Dior by John Galliano silk jersey newspaper-print dress from the Autumn/Winter 2000–01 Fly Girl collection. The dress was worn by Alexandra Leclerc to the Madrid Grand Prix on 11 September 2026.

It forms part of Époque Couture's collection of documented archival fashion, which includes runway pieces, haute couture and significant designs from major fashion houses of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

The Dior newspaper print is a particularly good example of why these pieces continue to matter. Its history stretches from Schiaparelli's experiments with press clippings in the 1930s, through one of John Galliano's most controversial periods at Christian Dior, to Sex and the City and its continued revival within Dior itself.

View the Christian Dior newspaper-print dress by John Galliano in the Époque Couture archive.

Please contact Époque Couture for enquiries.