Dior designer: Not all women can be models
PARIS: Not all women can be models, Dior designer Maria Grazia Chiuri said on Tuesday after a show inspired by the feminist artist Niki de Saint Phalle, who is famous for her fat ladies.
The Italian designer, who has made much of her own feminist credentials since becoming the fi rst woman to head the storied French label last year, led out her spring- summer collection at Paris Fashion Week with a Breton jumper bearing the slogan, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?”
The ironic rallying call kicked off Chiuri’s most colourful show for Dior, which fi zzed with Saint Phalle’s primary colours and liquorice pinks and yellows.
But the designer stopped short of casting larger models in her homage to the great FrancoAmerican artist who glorified the fuller female form in her voluptuous “Nanas” sculptures.
“Not all girls can be a model,” Chiuri told AFP as she praised a new charter banning ultra-thin models from the Paris catwalk.
“I think it’s a great idea... because I’m a woman, I have a daughter.
“At the same time we have to explain that not all people can be a model,” she added.
Because sometimes now everybody wants it all. If you want to be a singer you have to have a voice. If you want to be a climber you have to be athletic. There is something that is specific. Maria Grazia Chiuri, designer
‘It’s a job’
Chiuri’s comments came only two weeks after a wave of “plus- size” models led byAshley Graham made headlines at New York Fashion Week.
“Because sometimes now everybody wants it all. If you want to be a singer you have to have a voice. If you want to be a climber you have to be athletic. There is something that is specific,” Chiuri said.
The public often have the wrong idea about designers, she argued. “I don’t want to use anorexic girls. Sometimes people forget that it’s a job.”
“We work on a Stockman dummy. It is size 37. We don’t work on 40 because it is too difficult afterwards to make the other sizes. So there are some sizes that are good for making the fi rst prototype. So we need the girls who have the talent and are naturally born in this size.”
Earlier in the day the young French brand Jour/ne used a plus- sized model in its Paris catwalk show, although it preferred to call her “someone with curves”.
“We don’t want to pigeon-hole models,” a source at the label told AFP after the show, which raised eyebrows by using CocaCola branding on some of its clothes.
Chiuri said she loved models “that have personality. I love (the British model) Ruth ( Bell) because she has a strong personality. I think that you can feel it.”
The designer created a huge and spectacular cave with mirrored mosaics to show Dior’s collection in a nod to similar instalments that Saint Phalle created in Hamburg and Italy.
Chiuri began her reign at Dior with a T-shirt bearing the slogan “We should all be feminists”, and borrowed the “great women artists” line in her new show from an essay by the American feminist art historian Linda Nochlin. — AFP