What most impressed, however, was the raffia, which Chiuri had woven into tops, skirts, and a coat, as fine as any lace and real height-of-her-powers stuff.Rebelle's watercolor simulation is based on a real-world color mixing, blending, wet-diffusion, and drying.

The collaborations extended to Tassinari & Chatel by Lelièvre Paris, responsible for the silk embroideries that appeared near the end of the show. Chiuri also recruited the Dutch choreographers Imre and Marne van Opstal and their troupe to perform a carnally charged dance. The stage was set with a grotto made by the French artist Eva Jospin, its sublime intricacies belying its humble cardboard construction. Chiuri treated it more like an accessory, showing it unfastened and easy over blousy shirts. The Bar Jacket was only notable for its absence, and de Medici’s corset was utterly freed of its restrictive connotations. Three cities’ worth of shows confirms for anyone who was still unsure that the new generation’s views about exposure and bareness diverge from that of their elders. Chiuri made it a focal point of the collection, printing it the way she might the familiar toile de Jouy on a cotton trench coat, whose efficient modernity offered a counterpoint to the historical shapes that were a focus here.Īlso getting a rethink were New Look skirts in floral-embroidered cotton, patchworks of broderie anglaise, or that map print, which Chiuri split down the middle and paired with matching shorts. Doing research, she discovered a map of Paris in the archive dating to the house founder’s time, with Avenue Montaigne at its center (in most maps of Paris the street is further to the left it’s not the actual center of the city). Chiuri, too, is an Italian in France, one whose job it is to shape fashion, and she’s had no little success in her six years at Dior, as anyone who has walked by the new Avenue Montaigne flagship with its lines of shoppers can attest. The collection had an element of autobiography. “The idea was to play with this reference and how much fashion and power are in dialogue,” Chiuri said.

Her spring show today was a glance back at the past via the Italian noblewoman turned French queen Catherine de Medici, whose influence at court was not least of all sartorial.

On the fall Christian Dior runway, Maria Grazia Chiuri looked to the future and the ways in which technology will reshape-and is reshaping-fashion.

Rebelle dior