Fashion

3 mar 2023

The Dior show celebrates Edith Piaf and Paris in the 50s

Paris. Tuesday, Feb. 28 , 2023 – the house of Dior presented the first major show of this
Fall/Winter 2023-2024 Fashion Week. Maria Grazia Chiuri’s splendid collection finely revisited Dior heritage of the 1950s, and celebrated singers Edith Piaf and Juliette Gréco in an oneiric set designed by Portuguese artist Joana Vasconcelos.

By Léa Zetlaoui.

A Dior Fall/Winter 2023-2024 show celebrating Edith Piaf and Juliette Gréco

Since her arrival at Dior in 2017, Maria Grazia Chiuri has revisited the house’s abundant heritage one season after the other through her own lens and sensibility, as the very first female artistic director of the institution. For this Dior Fall/Winter 2023- 2024 show, the first major show of Paris Fashion Week, the Italian designer offered a rereading of the 1950s fashion that would “allow to deepen French fashion with three extraordinary personalities: Catherine Dior [Monsieur Dior’s sister and former member of the French Resistance], Édith Piaf, and Juliette Gréco”, as detailed in the collection’s notes. Three women who shared the same spirit of independence and were able to thwart feminine stereotypes in the post-war period.

Waists are fitted, skirts are straight and corolla dresses are long, while gloves, hats, and stilettos make a comeback in the wardrobe… Both feminine and conservative, the ensembles recall the fashion of the 1950s at a time when women were encouraged to go back home rather than to join the workforce as it had been the case during the war when men went to the front. True to her feminist approach, Maria Grazia Chiuri still finds a way to incorporate some casualness, sensuality, and even androgyny, to open new meanings to this eminently Parisian style. Half-open blouses, discreet sexy bras, loose T-shirts, less restrictive cuts, and biker boots are worn with ensembles made of precious poplins woven with metallic thread, while dresses adorned with abstract floral patterns and luminous embroidery are combined with strapped pumps and comma-shaped ‘virgule’ heels originally designed by Roger Vivier for Dior.

A Dior set designed by artist Joana Vasconcelos

Since she presented her subversive work The Bride (A Noiva), a five-meter-high chandelier made entirely of sanitary tampons, at the Venice Biennale in 2005, Portuguese artist Joana Vasconcelos has established herself as a major contemporary art figure. As the first female artist to be invited to the Château de Versailles in 2012, she represented Portugal at the Venice Biennale the following year. Then, Joana V asconcelos questioned the notion of femininity by transforming Valkyries – those ultra-violent virgin goddesses, daughters and messengers of the god Odin – into sensual characters. These same fabric, earthenware, and pottery figures, usually made in different shades of virginal white, now appear in a colorful version for the scenery of the Dior Fall/Winter 2023- 2024 show. “I am a baroque artist. And you can be baroque without color. Baroque is an artistic movement dear to the Portuguese people, it is part of their culture,” Joana Vasconcelos told Numéro in 2019. A luminous set design for a Dior Fall/Winter 2023-2024 show that celebrates the City of Light and its icons from the 1950s.