Less than two months after staging an 85-look Resort show in the Santa Monica Mountains, in a year that’s seen her crisscross the globe—to Japan for another show, to New York for the Met Gala—Maria Grazia Chiuri was at the Hôtel des Invalides today presenting her second haute couture collection for Christian Dior. Is it any wonder that she took travel, maps, and exploration as her themes?
On the 70th anniversary of the house’s founding, to be celebrated tonight with a Musée des Arts Décoratifs exhibition showcasing the work of all the house’s designers, Chiuri is speaking Christian Dior’s language. In the years following World War II, he traveled with his collections not just to California but to Tokyo, and to parts of South America, as well. In a preview at Dior headquarters, Chiuri said a 1953 illustration by Albert Decaris depicting Monsieur Dior’s trips, uncovered in the company’s new state-of-the-art archives, pointed the way this season, as did the observation, published in his autobiography, that “a complete collection should address all types of women in all countries.”
Many such women were represented in the crowd this afternoon: Canadian Céline Dion, the usual Hollywood contingent, plus clients from the Middle East and Asia wearing recent season Dior, bien sûr. But aside from some embroideries and paintings of elaborate, fantastical maps, this collection was not so much international as it was cosmopolitan. And in the end, of course, being inspired by Christian Dior’s 10-year tenure, it was very, very French: not only, but predominantly Dior gray, and bearing the imprint of original pieces from his collections with an important difference—Chiuri’s muses often sported men’s brogues and lug-soled ankle boots, not the spindly Roger Vivier heels Dior’s models would’ve worn.
It’s an irony that even in 2017, men’s tailoring on women signals a certain feminist bent. But irony or not, the sturdy swagger of a wrap-neck jumpsuit in wool herringbone, belted at the waist and with big functional pockets at the hips, will appeal to the same crowd that the woman-power T-shirts did at her ready-to-wear debut. In any case, it turned on this feminist. Chiuri’s reliance on heavy menswear fabrics was unusual for a modern-day couture show, even a Fall one, where a virtue is made of lightness above almost all else. Nonetheless, it’s true to the house’s heritage, says Chiuri. “Honestly, it’s completely different to see the real archive and the image that some people have about Christian Dior. There’s so much daywear.”
Still, she was savvy enough to answer every midi-length coat and chemisier dress with an ingénue frock in diaphanous chiffon or tulle. A quartet of silk velvet dresses with dramatic portrait necklines, however, provided the more striking, grown-up evening options. They looked fit for Chiuri’s lady explorer.
