SuzyPFW: Dior – The Art Of Designing For A Post-Lockdown World
“I think it is very inspiring to rethink fashion for the future,” said Dior designer Maria Grazia Chiuri.
I picked up another phrase in a long conversation before the show, held in Paris to a select audience, but shared digitally across the world.
“To cut is to think,” Maria Grazia said, quoting an essay by Germano Celant, the Italian art historian and curator who died earlier this year.
These words are as relevant to the shaping and sewing of her fashion work as to the wisdom of the many artists from her native Italy whom she mentioned as inspiration for this collection. They were led by the artist Lucia Marcucci and her method of incorporating collages into poetry. Maria Grazia described the artist’s work as “a collage of an idea of ‘cut’ – and thinking too.”
The complexity of thought behind the show was reduced in fashion terms to earthy colours: beige, brown and burnt orange, lightening to yellow gold. Or there were shades of blue.
They came with subtle and original treatments that could turn the effects from the softest of floral patterns to denim or the sudden intervention of cerulean.
The onlooker had to learn a lot and absorb with speed the various elements: the set, with its artistic collages inserted in “windows”, as if in a church, and the Italian singers – bold, strong, and apparently offering some ritual message in their own country, mourning the loss of husband or child.
After seeing an intricate palette of imagery before the show began, I was thinking that Maria Grazia might have been too buried in her native country, referencing in her conversation with me not only a Biennale in Florence but also many more Italian artists.
But the designer did a smart take on Japan and Indonesia – an inspiration from the archives of Monsieur Dior, back in the day. His sketch was inspired by kimonos, and brought an ease to the shapes, which were far looser than his famous “Bar” jacket of 1947.
Maria Grazia was clearly aware of the difficulties for the fashion industry of coming out of Covid lockdown, which she spent in her Italian home in Rome.
“I think our relationship with clothes is different now,” she said. “We stay at home more. We live in a different way, so I believed that it was necessary to start from a different point of view. For this prêt-à-porter, we felt we had to move more in the direction of an industrial designer, because the relationship between space, the house, our clothes and our body is very strong at the moment.“
“It is more intimate in some ways,” she continued. “It’s a dialogue between ourselves and where we used to wear clothes, with the idea of having a dialogue with people out in the street. Now, we stay home, and the relationship is different between the clothes, our body and the space where we are.”
A fresh shape was the lynchpin of this new collection, using light cotton for all the pieces that went with the jacket – trousers or skirts – that seemed soft and easy. The aim was to make the cut so that “the body defines the clothes”, Maria Grazia said. “So it is completely the opposite [from the New Look]. I hope it can work.”
It did. Although the designer’s style never falls far from her tree, she described this season’s offering as “paradoxically transforming the Dior silhouette while respecting its heritage”. She listed her female inspirations, from Virginia Woolf dressing in “infinite layers of colours” to Susan Sontag’s “simple white shirt”.
I am interested in reaching deep down to understand the thoughts behind fashion. Maria Grazia opened her heart to explain her thoughts and feelings. Yet even without all the references to artists and their modes of work, the collection, as a line-up of modern clothes in complex materials, was a fine example of texture and cut.
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