The new Christian Dior pret-à-porter collection for Spring / Summer 2023, designed by Maria Grazia Chiuri, praises the power of women, through a story inspired by Caterina de 'Medici.
A character who already exercised female power in the Renaissance not only in the politics of the French court, but also influenced her tastes and her Italian culture in France, which was one of the most powerful countries in Europe and a reference model for many other European states.
We can say that Caterina de 'Medici was the first "influencer" in Europe, in an era still five centuries away from the advent of mobile phones, social networks and the Internet.
In every Dior collection created by its creative director, there is room for a design imagination.
For this show, Chiuri again uses that look at the Paris map that emerged from the Dior archive, imprinted on the surface of a scarf and taken from the surroundings of Avenue Montaigne, where the famous atelier is based.
A print that animates dresses, skirts and dungarees.
The designer traces her own path between autobiography and curiosity.
Then emerges the Tuileries garden wanted by Caterina de 'Medici, the "Italian" who arrived at the court of France in 1533, an emblematic figure of the relationship between women and power, who fascinated Maria Grazia Chiuri for her political intelligence, but also for her innovations that he grafted to court.
The heels, the bust, the Burano lace, introduced in the royal factories.
Women know how to cross magical territories, they are in deep contact with nature and its primal strength.
They listen to that restlessness that often runs through them.
That most hidden part that is both darkness and wonder, like the baroque caves that the artist Eva Jospin was inspired by to set up the show inside the Tuileries garden.
Rebellious against imposed lives, women can exercise power in many ways, even with even imagined escape.
The power of fashion becomes the power of women, a form of awareness that draws on that attraction for the outside, for what lies beyond common perception, knowledge and experience.
Fashion dialogues with reality through artifice, the shapes of the court undergo a metamorphosis.
Maria Grazia Chiuri brings the bust back to today which becomes an almost geometric shape that surrounds the chest.
Thus the guêpière, sometimes hidden, sometimes evident, builds a silhouette echoing the wide skirts worn at the court of Caterina de 'Medici.
Today's savoir-faire appropriates the ancient tradition: they are then raffia coats encrusted with flowers and birds.
This collection celebrates fashion as a device capable of reconfiguring the city of Paris every time, and making present all the stories that have defined it.
Fashion as an urban phenomenon, a showcase of clothing assemblies that color contemporary spaces;
city as a place for the staging of the material and immaterial imaginaries of fashion.
(HANDLE).
