Watch the show here: Cruise 2018
Nicole Phelps Review:
See the show here!
I absolutely loved it. Maria's Dior is so human, the Dior lady is at once down to earth and in touch with reality. She's feminine, but not dainty. She's stylish, but not a slave to fashion. She's warm and inviting.
Nicole Phelps Review:
The Cruise circuit has the fashion set circumnavigating the globe—Paris and Milan last week and Kyoto next, with New York and Florence near the end of the month. Today’s hop off point, courtesy of Christian Dior, was the Upper Las Virgenes Canyon Open Space Preserve in Calabasas, California, a super remote mountaintop where MASH*, Little House on the Prairie, and Gone With the Wind were filmed. Calabasas is also the town that Kanye West made fashion famous with his most recent Yeezy collection. There were no Kardashians in the crowd, but Rihanna, Solange Knowles, and Miranda Kerr all made the trek.
Why California? Dior’s creative director Maria Grazia Chiuri candidly admitted that the location was chosen before her arrival at the house—a production with 800 local and out of town guests and honest to goodness hot air balloons doesn’t just come off over night. Presented with the California location, Chiuri said she went to the archives, where she came across the house founder’s Lascaux collection of 1951, inspired by the ancient cave paintings discovered in southwestern France a decade earlier. “For me, I found it close to L.A.,” she said of Monsieur Dior’s designs. “You think L.A. and you think Hollywood, Oscars, the red carpet, but honestly I feel people love this place because you feel in contact with the natural elements.” Indeed, one local advised against straying too far from the show’s tents—there be mountain lions in the Preserve. Rattlesnakes too.
Chiuri reproduced the Lascaux sketches as a silk and raffia jacquard used on New Look skirts and ponchos, as a print on a softer cotton shirtwaist dress, and as fur intarsias. The danger with such a motif is its literalness, accented here by the Dior Sauvage men’s fragrance branding on those balloons. But she conjured more than just spirit animals. Chief among her other interests this season were a Georgia O’Keeffe exhibition she saw at the Brooklyn Museum and a collaboration with Vicki Noble, the creator of the Motherpeace feminist tarot deck. From her start at Dior, Chiuri has linked magic with femininity and feminism. Here she went direct to the source, printing t-shirts with Noble’s tarot illustrations or painting them on the back of leather Perfectos. Today’s activation had not yet begun when Chiuri announced she was dreaming about one in which Noble does tarot readings in the brand’s Paris store. That human touch is the charm of Chiuri’s Dior. And, of course, Monsieur Dior was a lover of the tarot. As for O’Keeffe, milliner Stephen Jones’s parson’s hats were dead ringers for the topper the artist wore, and a double-face cashmere coat in black with white arabesques evoked her famous ram’s head paintings. Coats in the waisted, midi-length silhouette so associated with O’Keeffe were among the show’s subtlest and chicest pieces. The bead-embroidered easy denim looks numbered among the other highlights, along with several ethereal prairie dresses.
A rhapsody in blue, and nothing but blue, the Fall collection Chiuri presented in Paris last March erred repetitive. What with the color and pattern and the spectacular sunset, tonight’s show had more verve. In an interview Chiuri stressed the importance of forward momentum and lightness. “If you feel too much the history, you get stuck in a box.” But that’s not her only challenge. Having left her former design partner at Valentino, she has the daunting task of remaking one of fashion’s major houses while simultaneously redefining her own USP. Is there a better place to do that than in the land of reinvention?
See the show here!
I absolutely loved it. Maria's Dior is so human, the Dior lady is at once down to earth and in touch with reality. She's feminine, but not dainty. She's stylish, but not a slave to fashion. She's warm and inviting.
