Maria Grazia Chiuri’s autumn/winter 2021 Dior Haute Couture show was the house’s first with a live audience since February 2020. Anders Christian Madsen brings you five things to know about the show, and the knit-centric collection.
No part of fashion calls for human presence quite like haute couture. Activated by movement, it seduces your senses. It has to be seen and felt (and often even heard) to be believed. When Maria Grazia Chiuri realised that July would see Christian Dior’s return to real runways, with real guests, her mission was clear: after a year of couture films, we hanker for tactility. “What you see on film and in fashion shows are two different stories. We can give emotions through film but it’s very difficult to explain craftsmanship, embroidery, material. It’s important to use your senses,” she said during a real-life collection preview, an experience that is in itself an institution when it comes to experiencing and evaluating the intricacies of haute couture. Chiuri devoted her collection to the physical connection between human and textile, and the senses triggered by the hand-spun.
The walls of the set were hand-embroidered
After seasons of absence, guests once again descended upon a structure in the garden of the Musée Rodin where Dior traditionally hosts its Paris shows. Inside, Chiuri had commissioned the French textile artist Eva Jospin to cover the walls in landscape hand-embroideries, reminiscent of a salon in Rome’s Palazzo Colonna inspired by Indian textile. Executed by the Chanakya School of Craft in India – which supports female artisans and preserves traditional craftsmanship – the wall embroideries measured 350 metres and took three months to create. “It’s about solidarity between women,” Chiuri said, underlining a key part of her collection research: the communities that have traditionally formed around the creation of textiles, of handwork, and knitting.
Maria Grazia Chiuri focused on knitwear
On Chiuri’s boards were pictures of women through the centuries – embroiderers, patch-workers, petites mains – working in groups and exercising the physical sense of union through labour, which was taken away from us during the pandemic. “Textile is community work, and so is the couture atelier,” she said, referencing the book Threads of Life by the Scottish curator and needlework artist Clare Hunter, whom she had consulted during the making of the collection. On the backdrop of Jospin’s embroideries, Chiuri opened her show with a series of looks that transformed the classic codes of Christian Dior into knitted form, twisting and redefining them in the process. In the couture sales salons, clients will be able to choose the weight of the yarns used in garments according to where they live. “Our clients around the world need different weights for different temperatures,” Chiuri pointed out.
It was comfort couture
It was comfort couture
The knit-centric premise of the collection – which included matching knitted hats and boots – made for a decidedly daywear approach to haute couture, something Chiuri said was intentional. “For a year-and-a-half, we haven’t had many red carpets and people have had to wait with their weddings, so there’s less demand for evening dresses, and more demand for jackets and coats.” The fabrics of non-knitted looks, such as a series of minimal Bar suits that felt particularly relevant for a post-lockdown wardrobe, were created on looms, the operations of which are a couture-like process in their own right. In the super light evening dresses that closed the show, Chiuri continued to exercise attention to comfort, replacing corsetry with braiding and plissé techniques realised in fabric. “It’s the kind of workmanship you can only do on the body of clients. It would be very difficult to realise in prét-a-porter,” she explained. “The idea is also to create more functional daywear for all bodies.”
Chiuri employed artisans from around the world
For Chiuri, the return of the live audience was no doubt heaven sent. (“Fashion without a show is like religion with a church,” she told me on one of our calls during lockdown.) But it was also about something much bigger than the runway moment. It was a return to a platform that employs and supports artisans from around the world, whose niche craftsmanship survives because of it. “I really believe couture is not only Avenue Montaigne. It’s all around the world, where people with skills realise something very special,” she said. “When the big attack on the fashion system was happening during the pandemic, I was immediately sensitive to it. We have to impact less for the future, but we also have to understand which parts of the supply chain we have to support in order for these people to survive. We have to think of social impact.”
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