AN ODE TO HISTORY
EACH NEW COLLECTION FROM DIOR is an alchemical wonder born of the confrontation between images, bodies, silhouettes and language. For artistic director Maria Grazia Chiuri, this creative mechanism is no longer about breaking with the past. Rather, it’s a gateway to rediscovering and celebrating the richness of House codes.
For this ready-to-wear collection, Chiuri turned her attention to Teddy Girls, the female counterpoint to Teddy Boys—one of the first British subcultures of young men wearing clothes partly inspired by the styles worn by dandies in the Edwardian period—as a way of revisiting the 1950s, a post-war period marked by Christian Dior’s New Look that Chiuri has seldom explored before. The queens of a ravaged landscape, the Teddy Girls were impertinent characters with wild quiffs who wore Edwardian-style men’s jackets with velvet scarves, ample skirts, jeans and black leather jackets.
These references offer a new perspective on the 1950s, which Chiuri chose to associate with the character of Princess Margaret. Ever the rebel, the young princess in 1951 elected to wear a dress by Dior, rather than one by a British dressmaker, for her official 21st birthday portrait taken by Cecil Beaton. Christian Dior, for his part, was both fascinated and inspired by the mix of classicism and subversion, elegance and elegance and rebellion inherent in English culture, as illustrated by the exhibition titled Christian Dior: Designer of Dreams now at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. One by one, Chiuri reclaims Dior’s codes, drawing from its lexicon to create and reinvent the designs of tomorrow.
Back to the collection itself, we see the Dior Bar suit revisited with a more masculine line, through cuts, fabric and a velvet collar. It converses with gathered skirts made suppler through the use of technical fabrics that are also worked into dresses inspired by Christian Dior’s nipped-waist silhouettes. It is a conceptual and stylistic reinterpretation of the fifties infused with the spirit of sportswear then mixed with the house’s signature elegance.
The first in a series of historically referenced themes, the black leather jacket by Yves Saint Laurent for Dior—an homage to the underground culture of the 1950s and 1960s, and particularly to the French subculture blousons noirs— is here revisited by Chiuri.
Through the modernity of materials and techniques, the silhouette of the Miss Dior dress— which Christian Dior designed for the spring/ summer 1949 haute couture collection—expresses the mix of strength and grace the artistic director favours. This inspiration also informs evening dresses composed of bodysuits and skirts that may be embroidered with transparent paillettes or embellished with flowers in relief. Low-heeled shoes are tapered and cut low at the front front. A new palm tree version of Toile de Jouy recalls the work of artist Mario Schifano and appears on a
series of shirts or combines with checks and gingham, in black and red or black and white. Schifano’s works are also seen on the Lady Dior bags and Dior Book tote bags.
The accessories from this collection is also not to be overlooked. The Saddle bag in denim blue Dior Oblique-embroidered canvas and adorned with jewellery in aged gold-tone metal is one to have eyes on.
This season, Chiuri uses the occasion to celebrate several other female creatives. The silkscreened T-shirts are an homage to the literary works of Robin Morgan, the American feminist poet, with elements from Sisterhood is Powerful (1970), Sisterhood is Global (1984) and Sisterhood is Forever (2003), which celebrate the concept of sororities. Along with Morgan, Chiuri also takes Italian artist Tomaso Binga to design the scenography which relies on ABCs where each letter represents a different woman, based on her work Alfabeto from 1970. In so doing, the pieces in the autumn/winter 2019/2020 ready-to-wear collection reconnect with an idea of femininity that transcends gender and anatomy, and further the exploration of identity that Chiuri champions