As we step into Paris fashion Week, Dior Spring Summer 2018 show was extremely special as the house completes 70 this year, also marking Maria Grazia Chuiri’s 1st anniversary with the house of Dior.
During her research in the archives of the Dior house, Maria Grazia Chiuri, Artistic Director of the women’s collections, was interested in a series of photographs by Niki de Saint Phalle. On one of them is the artist on camel’s back; on others, she poses for Dior, at the time of Marc Bohan, his great friend, then at the head of the creations of the House. Embodying the beauty of her time, small and sharp, more teenager than an orrogynous, she affirms a clothing style both iconic and personal, current in its proportions and impertinences.
At the time of the emancipation of the woman, Niki de Saint Phalle launches in a melee with the art, the world and herself. Like all artists, it is carried by its emotions. It is this feminine creativity that speaks to Maria Grazia Chiuri.
“Why have not there been great female artists? This is the question posed by Linda Nochlin’s essay published in 1971, which also calls Maria Grazia Chiuri. It is necessary to restore their place to these different and unique artists, for they transgress the traditionally male discourse of art history and that of fashion.
These are the Nanas, the sculptures of extraordinary women, but also the motley hearts, the dragons, the tree of love, and this exaggerated and delusional work, the Tarot Garden in Tuscany, which become patterns, broken embroideries and mosaics of mirrors in the collection of Maria Grazia Chiuri and the scenography of the parade. As she chooses to take again the colorful palette of Niki de Saint Phalle, almost screaming, and to make it dialogue with lace, silk, leather or plastic.
This collection of ready-to-wear spring-summer 2018, inspired by the artist, also refers to Marc Bohan and his little dresses and combinations, sometimes associated with wide open skirts at the front. They are also large peas, black and white tiles, trousers worn with jackets or Saharans, associated, according to the mood, with men ‘s shirts with fine stripes, polka dots or a romantic white: borrowed from the vocabulary of Marc Bohan.
Finally, the atmosphere and the references of the collection, explicit or implicit, transport us into the brazen agitation of the 1960s that illustrate the changing force of the female universes. They not only change the fashion, but also the contemporary world.
