Daring to enter the house of Dior requires an empathy with its history, a willingness to decode its language,which is part of the collective imagination, and the resoluteness to put all of it in a box. Not to erase it, but to storeit, looking ahead, coming back to bits, traces or entire silhouettes from time to time, like revisiting memories.It’s an ever-evolving sentiment and task that is both complex and instinctive.
Throughout, an embrace of beauty has enduringly taken shape in the House, no matter the moment. The Diorlanguage is at once familiar and surprising. It is an invitation to dream big – accepting the theater of life, enjoyingthe power of fashion to rewire the everyday into a grand fantasyscape – that does not ask for descriptions.It entices feelings, which can be shaped into as many words as the eyes that see it.
The feeling behind the vision that unfolds today is one of harmony and tension. Signs culled from the House’slong history coalesce into a drawing that allows the silhouette to telegraph the message with a line. An idea of thepast converses with the present, the bold with the calm, the grand with the commonplace. Everything is expressedthrough the filter of Dior, which is a chromatic sensibility – soft, pictorial, considered, with sudden ruptures – aswell as an exquisite way to make things, virtuoso even when they are apparently simple.
Putting history into a box creates an implosion – hats implode into themselves, too. The order of things isrearranged; fragmentation allows space for the Dior woman to delve into grandness, swiftness, taut everydaynessor a sugar rush; to flow vertically or extend sculpturally.
Dressing as a way to become a character on the stage that is life, allowing clothing to redesign both poise andappearance, boxing and unboxing history to react to the overload and emotional stimulation of the moment inempathetic ways. Change is inevitable.
The stark show space designed by Luca Guadagnino and Stefano Baisi merged the digital with the physical. As related through the imagery of a specially commissioned work by documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis, the House’s history flashed in front of the guests’ eyes on an inverted LED pyramid before magically imploding into a Dior shoe box. It symbolized a stored past that can be revisited like memories.
photo credit © ADRIEN DIRAND
