Dior SS 2023 show – how is it made
Each Maria Grazia Chiuri collection is designed to open up room for the inventive imagination. For this Dior spring-summer 2023 ready-to-wear défilé, the Creative Director of Dior women’s lines notably uses the image of a map of Paris from the House’s archives, printed on the back of a scarf and structured around the Avenue Montaigne*. Thus she traces her own path, between autobiography and reflection. Then comes the Tuileries Garden, which was commissioned by Catherine de Medici. An Italian who arrived at the French court in 1533, this noblewoman remains a figure emblematic of the relationship between women and power, and fascinates Maria Grazia Chiuri because of her political intelligence, but also the innovations she launched, such as heels, the corset, and Burano lace, introduced to the royal manufactures.
Women know how to explore magical territories since they have a privileged connection with nature and its vital force. They listen to the turmoil that often traverses them. That most secret realm, at once in the shadows and marvelous, is like the baroque caves that inspired the artist Eva Jospin for the decor she dreamed up for this show in the heart of the Jardin des Tuileries.
Noncompliant with predetermined existences, women are capable of exercising power in many ways, including by escaping through the mind. The power of fashion becomes the power of women, a form of awareness that draws on this attraction to the outside world, to what lies beyond perception, knowledge and common experience. Fashion dialogues with reality through artifice; the garments of the Court are transformed. Maria Grazia Chiuri updates the corset by giving it a quasi-geometric shape that frames the bust. Thus, the guêpière, sometimes hidden, sometimes visible, outlines a silhouette reminiscent of the wide skirts worn at the court of Catherine de Medici. An ancestral tradition, raffia coats adorned with floral and bird motifs, that is also revisited with Dior’s creativity and contemporary expertise.
This collection pays homage to fashion as an art of invention, able to redefine the city of Paris over and over again, each and every time, allowing the multiple facets of its history to live on. Fashion as an urban concept, a showcase of clothes that color the spaces of our time; the city as a backdrop for the material and immaterial imagination of fashion and beyond. The map as a means of staging a city, of expressing the cultural complexity of our era, celebrating the power of the women who navigate it daily.
As if entering a new world – that is the impression given by the set of the Dior spring-summer 2023 ready-to-wear show. Outlining a marvellous reverie, Maria Grazia Chiuri gave carte blanche to Eva Jospin – with whom she had previously collaborated on the Dior autumn-winter 2021-2022 haute couture défilé – to envision a baroque grotto in sublimated cardboard, a key material for the artist, a privileged object of her research, and here the organic matter of the extraordinary.
The Buttes Chaumont grotto in Paris, the Villa Borromeo Visconti Litta in Lombardy, the frescoes of the Palazzina Cinese in Palermo all provide inspiration for Eva Jospin’s ingenious installation, which recreates reality through artifice, like a baffling secret passage between art and fashion. Architectural structures carved into the rock, grottos are transformed over time by the evolution of nature and the embedded shells. Gallery, forest, cave: the artist’s universe explores the inner landscape, the enigma and energy of femininity, between dream and illusion, ruins and vegetation.
At the heart of this scenography aglow with mystery is the choreography, conceived by the creative duo Imre and Marne van Opstal, which questions the human condition, the limits and the possibilities of the body. For this show, which Maria Grazia Chiuri describes as a collective collaboration arising from the meeting of different projects and languages, they have created a performance reminiscent of the Renaissance, reinterpreting it in the sense, precisely, of an actual re-birth. Like sculptures in motion, they are endowed with a force that is both ancestral and resolutely contemporary.
Between illusion and mystery, shade and light, Maria Grazia Chiuri creates a wardrobe of hypnotizing, sovereign elegance, inspired by the figure of Catherine de Medicis. The stylistic emblems of the Court, such as corsets or crinolines, are structured with sportswear details. Trenches are reinvented, combining the volume of baroque costumes with the iconic Dior silhouette. Deepest black contrasts with the purity of white; a palette of soft colors sublimated by the lightness of long shirts and skirts gliding with grace. Celebrating the virtuosity of needlework, different techniques of embroidery and indeed crochet interact with raw, almost organic materials – like raffia – punctuating the looks with a touch of contemporary couture. A dream-like image of a winter garden, at once dark and scintillating, the floral prints convey the vitality of the vegetal world, embellishing dresses, pants and coats with new poetic force. An ode to the potency of fashion as an expression of feminine power.
More photos: Dior Facebook