As has become tradition, the Christian Dior haute couture show took place at Paris’s Musée Rodin, with the collection itself shown inside a large, white cube. Guests entered through the museum, walking past Rodin’s The Kiss and beds of roses.
Inside, bright lights lit up the space, while large display units containing various white tailored garments stretched from floor to ceiling. The overall effect was the intimate feeling of an atelier. If last season’s interior (and collection) was themed around fantasy and nature, this season’s has been designed to be more real, more behind-the-scenes and more grounded.
The question hanging over this Dior collection’s concept is: “Is it possible to celebrate haute couture while also offering a critical reading of it?” a question arguably controversial given the astronomical prices of couture. Still, Dior concentrated on answering it. First by suggesting haute couture is “a concept” and by suggesting it could be modernized, either using lighter, more wearable fabrics, all the while using the clothing exhibited on the walls as reminders of how the pieces came to be.
“The atelier is a space of the mind but also a real space,” Maria Grazia Chiuri said backstage, before highlighting the precariousness of the atelier in a world of fast fashion. “I wanted a collection that is not so visible on social media. We live in the moment, the right now.”
And so under a mirrored ceiling that stretched the length of the room, which conversely became well utilised on social media, she sent out a collection that started with a classic couture structure and ended with newness and fluidity.
The first look, a midnight blue three-piece, herringbone suit, with a spin on the famous Dior bar jacket with cinched waist, padded hips and an updated batwing sleeves. Tweed coats and leather berets with tightly wound ponytails peeking out, alongside form-fitting strapless dresses in chiffon and crepe, which came in blue and taupe. Sultrier greens and blacks and gold gowns and coats followed, arriving in different textures, some covered with tapestry fabric, others with flowers in relief.
As the show continued, the skirts grew fuller and the fabrics became more modern, with gowns switching from chiffon to lace, to scuba. The final three dresses were jewel-coloured, strapless dresses, Gallic evening wear as imagined by Dior, except made from modern-sounding silk scuba.
“The clothes maintain the shape but actually, they are different. It is hard to see. To run this great risk of explaining Dior’s high fashion has pushed me the historical moment and the intent to make this world understand the new generations of customers in the world”, explains Maria Grazia Chiuri who worked on black, on nude mixed with the gray cloud of tulle, on the satin made contemporary and on very rare embroideries such as velor sablè that nowadays can only do two people in the world.
The jewels of this Dior haute couture, designed by Maria Grazia herself among rabbits, griffins and unicorns, are also special.
The more classic style, on the other hand, accompanies the pointy shoes with the golden ‘Virgola’ heel, and the prom dresses in tulle or graceful lace in all shades of ‘nude’, the color of the skin that every customer of the high Dior fashion can request in the atelier. And wearing a suit of the color of one’s body and one’s skin is the supreme luxury.
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