Butterflies and freedom, Dior Cruise's Frida Kahlo parades - Lifestyle

Already in the teasers that anticipated the Dior Cruise 2024 fashion show in Mexico City, videos shot in the Capitoline Museums, in the Archaeological Museum of Naples, at the Louvre and in the Frida Khalo Museum, called the Casa Azul museum (Blue House) located in the center of Coyoacán, a suburb of Mexico City, it was sensed that for the realization of the Dior Cruise collection that Maria Grazia Chiuri, creative director of the highest maison French, she was preparing to present at night, among the arcades of the inner courtyard of the Antiguo Colegio de San Idelfonso, she would draw from all the culture and from the main characters that belong to the history of Mexico.
Chiuri found in the butterfly, a symbol of transformation, rebirth but also of freedom, the common denominator between different cultures. In the videos that anticipate the parade you can see a butterfly among the mythological figures of the sarcophagus of the Child of the Captolini Museums. A butterfly reappears in the famous mosaic of the Archaeological Museum of Naples: the famous Memento mori found in Pompeii showing a skull, above whose head hangs a lead wire attached to a wooden team (hence the famous poem by Totò "A livella") while below appears a butterfly and a six-spoke wheel. Large butterflies fly on the dark background on which the profile of the Estense Princess is outlined, a fifteenth-century painting attributed to Pisanello, preserved in the Louvre Museum in Paris. The butterflies are found in the Still Life painted by Frida Khalo "But she herself - comments Chiuri looking at one of her self-portraits where she wears an ethereal wing dress and a chrysalis bodice - is the symbol of overcoming her physical limits through her art".
The meanings associated with this iconography are varied. The skull represents death, therefore the transience of life, the butterfly is the soul, the wheel is the human fortune the capitolini.
In Mexican culture, the butterfly is the symbol of life that is transformed, of the female soul that is freed.
The Dior Cruise collection by Maria Grazia Chiuri presented in Mexico City is the transposition of two conditionings. The first stems from the working method of the designer who, since directing Dior, has exploited the cruise collections to explore the culture and craftsmanship of the country in which it is presented. The second conditioning derives from the history of Mexico itself and its female protagonists in the various decades of the last century. Hence the enhancement of craftsmanship through a wide declination of lace dresses with that unmistakable craftsmanship that is now a hallmark of the brand. The butterflies are drawn in the laces that create wide skirts, airy shirts, long and wide robes in black and white, like a rich country lady. Always butterflies become long necklaces or settle on fabric robes. Always to see on the catwalk that Frida Kahlo in love with Diego Rivera, of a toxic love, present with a perceived story of her immense ability to paint her pain, physical for the body battered by the accident, and psychological for the sentimental suffering caused by the man who was supposed to alleviate his existential malaise. Another figure that inspired Maria Grazia Chiuri, important for Mexico, is the photographer Tina Modotti. (ANSA).