English Version | Modernity and opulence

Some people call it "contemplative" Haute Couture, and it's an epithet that suits it particularly well. Last January, on a cold winter's day, the gardens of the Rodin Museum were transformed into an "art gallery" to host Dior's spring/summer 2024 Haute Couture show. Among the celebrities with thousands of followers in the front row, photographers were trying to catch Glenn Close (in a pristine white suit), Natalie Portman (brand ambassador) or Carla Bruni (wearing a marvelous bar jacket): strong, powerful and charismatic women, just like the ones Maria Grazia Chiuri, the maison's creative director, likes to portray in her collections. The Italian, who took over in 2016, has never hidden her desire to emphasize the importance of functionality and the intelligence of materials - and therefore of clothes - in all her proposals. That's why, season after season, she insists on inviting (female) artists to collaborate on various aspects of the "big day". In this case, the invitation fell to Isabella Ducrot, an Italian textile artist whose work proposes a human approach to fabrics, both in the way they are made and in their implications for our lives and bodies. It was her Big Aura installation that adorned the walls of the room, twenty-three dresses of extraordinary dimensions, each about 196 inches high, arranged in a composition of irregular black stripes that evoke weft and warp; a symbol, albeit abstract, of clothing, an emblem of power that transcends the body. Drawing parallels with fashion, the Big Aura is the aura that permeates each piece of Haute Couture. In fact, it is a perpetually fertile ground for contemplation, where the reproduction of the original is never the same, each piece adapted, or moulded, to the bodies of those who are going to wear it.

This notion of contemplation was, in a way, the great basis for this fashion show. For Maria Grazia Chiuri, the Haute Couture shows represent a (new) opportunity to start a dialogue between the essence of Dior and its contemporary evolution - a bridge, even if invisible to the naked eye, between the DNA of the maison and the future that is being sewn every day in the ateliers. Little by little, the straight lines of tailoring bend to form modern versions of emblematic silhouettes from the 1950s, such as the La Cigale dress, created by Christian Dior for autumn/winter 1952 (and endowed with codes essential to its creator's identity, namely rigid construction and geometric cuts) and now reinterpreted in a mesmerizing cherry-red strapless version. The Miss Dior dress, another of the brand's iconic pieces, is reinvented in a bright yellow variation, a dazzling note that sublimely illuminates the collection. Embroidery with ribbons, beads, raffia and chenille threads unfolds over motifs inspired by the 1950s, producing captivating material effects. Velvet and moiré (one of the couturiers' favorite materials of the last century) ripple with their shimmering sparkles over the silhouettes, putting textile art at the centre of Haute Couture more than ever. The bold, cultural cuts reveal unique lines that play with the codes of the daytime and evening wardrobe. The trench coat is revisited in various ways, metamorphosing into a skirt or a trouser suit, proof that the biggest fashion statements can also be functional. In the end, what remains is a collection with layers of past and present, simplicity and opulence, reverence and innovations masterfully stitched together. There's nothing quite as modern as that.

Originally published in The Memories Issue, from April 2024. Full stories and credits are in the print version.