If other brand honchos think of collaborations as splashy team-ups, she sees them as a process of relationship-building and a way to share the stage. She is one of the few women leading a major fashion brand, first of all, but she has also, season by season, redefined the concept of collaboration, as I wrote in a profile of her this past fall. “A way to prepare them for the future.Dior creative director Maria Grazia Chiuri is one of the most unorthodox designers working today. It’s a way to teach young people what happens in the world,” she said. Chiuri’s collection was a thought-provoking illustration of our relationship with beauty, excess, and our own image: something to be enjoyed in moderation, you might say. As we prepare to transition back into a life of possibility, perhaps their warnings of vanity are worth noting. Hyde to Dostoevsky’s The Double or Andersen’s terrifying stories of The Little Mermaid, The Snow Queen, The Shadow, and The Emperor’s New Clothes. It’s curious how many fairy tales have dealt with themes of narcissism and gluttony, which could now be mirrored in the social media age, from gothics like The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Strange Case of Dr. “People don’t just want functionality and timelessness. Chiuri paid homage to his Steadfast Tin Soldier in royal guard coats, adding some magic dust to the idea of the essential wardrobe. A thorny ankle strap graced a pair of ruby pumps that nodded to Oz, or perhaps Hans Christian Andersen’s The Red Shoes, a brutal story of desire and vanity. Roses and apples-the eternal symbols of fairy tales-appeared in prints adapted from those created for Dior by Andrée Brossin de Méré in the ’50s.Īlice in Wonderland’s prim black white-collared schoolgirl dresses materialized dangerously in leather, a feeling echoed in Broderie Anglaise that morphed into knitwear or strict laser-cut leather bibs retaining that looming danger. That same gray tailoring was adorned with riding hoods and transformed into dramatic capes. Conversely, she contrasted it with the temptation of fairy-tale dressing. On one side, Chiuri exercised her sense for pragmatism in stringent tailoring embodied by the humble fabrics of menswear, in performancewear-like puffers quilted in the house cannage pattern, and in rigid military codes, embracing our rediscovered appetite for the great outdoors. It was pure post-lockdown psychology: a longing for opulence suppressed by strict austerity. But I’m probably a different generation.” Titled Disturbing Beauty, she filmed her Christian Dior show in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, a gallery created by a self-deifying 17th-century crown so it could mirror itself in its own greatness. “Can you imagine me taking a picture of myself in the mirror? Impossible! It’s not something that’s on my mind. I probably have one mirror and it’s behind my bathroom door,” Maria Grazia Chiuri said, speaking from Paris on one of those video calls. “You’re talking to a woman who has no mirrors in her house. On video calls, we are constantly confronted with our own thumbnail reflection staring back at us. Confined to our homes, digital narcissism has intensified, from casually staged self-portraits on the iPhone auto-capture to the timeless attraction of the mirror selfie. Yet the ego-centric mentality of the social media era-the “So-Me” era-wants what it wants. Now we talk about a wardrobe reset: a post-lockdown reduction of excess to an appearance more essential. With no reason to dress up, be seen, or-on some days-even look in the mirror, the past year has been an opportunity to reconsider a culture of vanity that was running on overload.
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