Dior Fall collection dazzles on Shanghai’s Bund
For Dior Women’s wear creative director Maria Grazia Chiuri, unveiling her Fall 2021 collection at the Long Museum West Bund in Shanghai represents an extraordinary opportunity to infuse her pieces with a visual force in motion and a new energy.
Dior, a guest of honor at this year’s Shanghai Fashion Week, has and continues to exemplify the power of creativity and world cultures by staging a show reinterpreting a range of themes and revisiting the House’s mainstay aesthetics, such as English artist Richard Hamilton’s take on Pop Art and visual artist Marco Lodola’s acidic New Futurism.
A showpiece among the many emblematic pieces in the performance was an iconic leopard print coat — a hallmark design of Dior founder Monsieur Dior.
Garments featured similarly inspired spotted effects in a range of fluorescent hues. Elements of silver embroidery punctuated pink tulle and toile de Jouy motifs in lace represented figures with decorations and landscapes.
Others included pieces in ultra black, checks in navy, gray and chartreuse, and the classic Dior millefleurs motif in black silk velvet.
Embroidered items featured giant sequins and mirror-like discs, recalling the glittering disco balls that illuminated the show’s decor and four brand new dresses.
The collection, created by Dior’s Maria Grazia Chiuri, showcased a phantasmagoria of materials and shapes, including icons and musthaves such as the revisited doublebreasted Bar jacket. A series of exclusive dresses, each in a different neon hue — as well as red, “the color of life” as Monsieur Dior once noted — pay tribute to the House’s archives and enrich the collection. Presented to the musical rhythms of composer Giorgio Moroder — punctuated by the voice of the iconic Maripol — the creations are designed for facing the current context with the high energy, hyper-sophistication and profound lightness of the Pop spirit.
To round out Dior’s Fall collection show, Chinese singer Joey Yung, wearing a dress specially conceived by Maria Grazia Chiuri, and rock band Black Panther performed live.
It is the first time that Dior has launched a Fall collection on a runway in China.