On one hand, there’s the 1953 Albert Decaris etching that turned up in the Dior archives, a map of the five continents that retraces the House’s expansion around the world. On the other, there’s the couturier’s assertion in his autobiography, Dior by Dior: “A complete collection should address all types of women in all countries.” Both inspirations guided Maria Grazia Chiuri, the Artistic Director of women’s collections, in creating the Autumn-Winter 2017-2018 Haute Couture collection that celebrates the House’s 70th anniversary.
For Maria Grazia Chiuri, the atlas symbolizes a desire for faraway lands, the need to travel to discover the world and oneself, to feel emotion, grow and evolve. It evokes her own journey from Rome to Paris and her exploration of the Dior heritage. As restless as the first female explorers who overcame geographical and psychological frontiers, she is drawn to the heroine’s flair for borrowing elements from the masculine wardrobe and mixing them with ethnic pieces.
Thanks to the designer’s sensitivity and new technologies, men’s wear fabrics are transformed into shimmering surfaces and chiaroscuro on jackets, coats, blouses and jumpsuits that recall aviator jackets and open into pleated culotte skirts.
Meanwhile, the masculine fedora by Stephen Jones, the milliner who this year celebrates his 20 th anniversary as Dior’s hat designer, nods to explorers such as Freya Stark. The path taken in this homecoming becomes, for Maria Grazia Chiuri, a topography of emotions: colors, flowers and embroidered tarot cards themselves become atlases on capes and evening gowns in silk and tulle, in gray powdered with pink or nocturnal shades of velvet. This fairyland, an imaginary cartography that invents and challenges one’s point of view, recalls the monumental maps and globes of grand interiors: they relay the power of feminine literary roamings, sprinkled with explorations of culture and style. The artist Pietro Ruffo, with whom Maria Grazia Chiuri shares a creative bond, designed the decor, which retraces the Earth and the celestial sphere with poetic grace.
