DIOR AND ART

How Maria Grazia Chiuri revolutionized the famous fashion brand with the Art

After telling you about the link with the Art of Moncler, Gucci, Louis Vuitton and Prada, Dior is also taking part in the revolution of values that the fashion system is investing in, through contamination with art, which is becoming the conditio sine qua non of every show and collection.

Ever since she took office at the Dior fashion house in September 2016, Creative Director Maria Grazia Chiuri’s aim has been to enhance and highlight the great savoir-faire of the fashion house, injecting creativity and contemporaneity through the values of art and culture.

Today Chiuri is the creative director of Dior Haute Couture but her career began much earlier, when she was hired as a designer in 1989 by Fendi and then in 1999 by Valentino. 

From the beginning Maria Grazia Chiuri shows how fashion is really an interdisciplinary subject, which cannot be limited to the simple development of technical creativity without having cultural references. For the designer, in fact, it is fundamental to have an educational background and always cultivate it. In Dior, for example, she has created a Cultural Office that supports her to do historical and artistic research that will then be a source of inspiration for her collections.

Hence the need to create a strong link between fashion and art, which the Italian Chiuri uses to give greater prominence to the enormous evocative power and attractiveness that have always distinguished the maison. 

In particular, his attention is focused on female artists. The feminist theme is in fact very dear to Maria Grazia Chiuri, who since her arrival in Dior, has done a lot of talking about herself to be the first woman to run the brand after 70 years.

The relationship with female art, particularly surrealist art, is evident in Haute Couture Spring Summer 2018, inspired by the period when Christian Dior had an art gallery in Paris where he met, sponsored and collaborated with the Italian surrealist artist, Leonor Fini. Other surrealist artists highlighted by Maria Grazia Chiuri for Dior were Lee Miller, Dora Maar, Leonora Carrington and Jacqueline Lamba .

“Surrealist women are less well known than men and we often know them as muses rather than the talented artists they really were. They were very modern figures, nonconformist for the time in which they lived, and the way they expressed themselves through clothing has long been of great interest to me”.

It is no coincidence that in 2019 Dior sponsored an exhibition in Milan entitled “Il soggetto Imprevisto – 1978 Arte e Femminismo in Italia”, which offered a reflection on fashion, feminism, art, innovation and tradition.

Speaking of art and tradition, in the last two years the Creative Director of Dior, through numerous collaborations with contemporary artists, has laid the foundations of a new method to create a collection that weaves art, history and elegance.

Let’s think of Dior’s show in Marrakech for the Cruise 2020 collection: starting from Wax Fabrics (the homonymous handmade printing technique, made up of multiple steps to imprint patterns and colours on the fabrics), Chiuri entrusted to artists and designers of African origin the codes of the maison so that they could make a personal interpretation of them in a Wax key: among these we also find the artist Mickalene Thomas.

Recently Maria Grazia Chiuri enchanted the whole world with the Cruise 2021, held in Piazza Duomo in Lecce. “Strenght and Dignity”, “Strength and Dignity” could be read among the sentences written in the more than 30 thousand Led bulbs that composed the extraordinary luminous set designed for the occasion by the artist Marinella Senatore. These, in fact, are the two main characteristics of the people of Salento, in particular women, well described by the popular songs of the “pizzica” that were the background of the parade. 

Maria Grazia Chiuri is therefore an artist herself who, through art, feminism and tradition, is revolutionizing the Dior maison with a cultural approach to fashion capable not only of making her way in the market but also, and above all, of orienting herself in the world.

And you, are you ready to discover the next collaborations between Art and Fashion?