![]() It was a straight-forward exercise: From the Bar jacket to the wrap coat and the cannage, Jones worked each of the Dior icons into something that would resonate with a contemporary male customer.Īsked if it felt more “him,” Jones pulled up Vogue Runway on his phone and searched for the Fall 2005 collection of his eponymous label. ![]() The nasal might of Christian Dior spoke on the soundtrack with godlike authority as Jones’s interpretations of the couturier’s signature silhouettes bathed in his favorite “Dior gray” strolled along the bridge’s banister. In true grande maison style, Jones erected a life-size copy of Pont Alexandre III in a tent on Place de la Concorde, just a stone’s throw from the real one. As a tribute to the green-fingered founder, you could say Jones collaborated with the ghost of Christian Dior himself, putting in proverbial neon lights the archive genetics that naturally underpin any collection he does. Actually, “one-man show” isn’t entirely accurate. “We’ve done a Birkenstock, but only because we didn’t want to do a Christian Dior gardening shoe and copy it,” the designer said during a preview the day before. Against a background of aggression by a murderous megalomaniacal male-run state, that hope looks more poignant-yet more vital-than ever.It might come as a surprise that Kim Jones, who has devoted most of his Dior collections to collaborations with artists and writers, approached his 75th anniversary homage to the house as a one-man show. The artistic concept symbolically looks forward to a time when women will take over the running of the world and do it in a better way. Chiuri transferred the appellation of the artist’s work “The Next Era” to her own collection, with the artist’s permission. ![]() The environmental ambience was created by the Italian feminist artist Mariella Bettineschi, who reimagines the objectified female subjects of “Old Masters” as women and girls with their own agency and ability to perceive things outside of patriarchy and colonialism. There were passages of skirt suits with asymmetric hems, substantial daywear with checked tweeds and dissected trenches to add to all this, followed up with diaphanous chiffon for evening. Ditto the delicate sunray pleats of another midi dress, where the intersecting strands made the skirt swirl transparently in the light. Light years from a cozy sweater, a beautifully fine cobwebby lace bodice on a fluffy tiered skirt was entirely knitted by computerized machine. What came over best was some amazing knitwear-again due to new Italian industrial technology. That went right down to the shoes-Roger Vivier’s original ’50s Louis heels for Dior, but with technical “anti-twist” ankle straps, and vividly collaged beading. We are used to expecting it in very practical things: washing machines, but not fashion.”Ĭhiuri liked the challenge of finding co-habiting synergies between Dior’s sober gray suiting and feminine chiffon dresses and technical biker jackets, football shoulder pads and protective racing gloves. “We use technology more for communication, and think less about how it can help us to live better. “We have this idea that technology is something just a little bit unreal,” Chiuri contended before the show. With a side-nod to Dune, and, of course, Chiuri’s underpinning framework of female empowerment, courtesy of her relationships with feminist artists. But still: this collection was her most daring bid yet to engage Christian Dior-and its Bar jacket, corset and New Look swirly midi-with advancing modernity and technology. The images of protection and hinted-at derivatives of armor which immediately surfaced to the naked eye in the collection cannot have had anything directly to do with how Maria Grazia Chiuri had planned out the spirit and execution of her fall show months ago. That tension was the unintended consequence of the toxic twist of timing. ![]() ![]() The atmosphere radiated an equivalent of the double-consciousness of an audience looking at fashion while anxiously checking its phones for news of the war in Ukraine. The walls of the set featured images of women with two sets of eyes. A wired woman walked out first at the Dior show, her bodysuit outlined in light-up-in-the-dark fluorescent green. ![]()
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