Maria Grazia Chiuri, the womenswear designer for Dior, has had time to play dress-up with her dolls when she was younger.
She presented her Autumn/Winter 2020-2021 Haute Couture collection as miniature gowns fit for any Barbie, or G.I. Joe figurine you may have stashed away in your box of nostalgia.
In a film titled “Le Mythe Dior” which was directed by Italian filmmaker Matteo Garrone, a favorite of Grazia Chiuri, fantasy and inanimate dresses are brought to life.
The Dior Haute Couture
In the fashion of “Theatre De la Mode,” when artists and fashion designers collaborated during World War II in France, Dior has brought back to life the surreal worlds that were created by designers and couturiers.
The display of dolls in the fashion of the time was a world away from the one lived in. During the 1940s “Theatre De La Mode” was an escape of the turmoil that Europe was suffering from.
Creating these 37 couture dresses took just as much painstaking work as any couture dress would take, as can be seen in videos on Dior’s website.
And each dress carries and luster that is of fantasy and unbelievable scale to reality. The dresses uphold the mastery that is couture, fluid, and feminine, braided accents, velvet materials, popping color, hand-pleated with classic drapery.
“Surrealist images manage to make visible what is in itself invisible. I’m interested in mystery and magic, which are also a way of exorcising uncertainty about the future,” said Maria Grazia Chiuri of her haute couture collections on the Dior site.
The trunk which can house up to 10 gowns [visibly] is a replica of the 30 Avenue Montaigne where the house of Dior is located in the city of Paris.
And in the film “Le Mythe Dior,” you can see this trunk being carried throughout the whimsical forest by two bell boys.
They approach each scene with caution, unveiling the contents of the trunk, Dior autumn/winter 2020-2021 haute couture dresses, which the women make romanticized selections over.