(Paris) First major show of Paris Fashion Week, Dior paid tribute on Tuesday to its “miss”, creation of sixties when “fashion left the workshop to conquer the world”, to the sound of I love you, me neitherfrom the Birkin/Gainsbourg tandem.
The first silhouette emerges in a beige and demure suit crossed out with the acronym “Miss Dior” as if screen-printed with a large brush.
Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg “come and go” between the ears of the public, gathered by the hundreds in an ephemeral cube in the Tuileries gardens, designed by Indian artist Shakuntala Kulkarni.
In the front row, the South Korean singer JISOO, from Blackpink, who brought hundreds of fans to Place de la Concorde, the Spanish superstar Rosalía, the actresses Jennifer Lawrence and Natalie Portman. In the stands, hundreds of customers and friends of the brand who came or were invited from all over the world.
All the mixture of bourgeoisie and rich and nouveau riche fantasy is available in the collection, from the gabardine to the little dress, via tweed, from the almost Geneviève de Fontenay hat to the more urban denim and the leopard which warms up this collection of winter 2024/2025.
PHOTO SARAH MEYSSONNIER, REUTERS
The clothes are decorated with the “Miss Dior” acronym as if screen-printed with a large brush.
The colors of the show take up the palette of Marc Bohan, who died in September and who directed creation at Dior for a quarter of a century: white, orange, beige, gold.
The designer Maria Grazia Chiuri, at the head of the artistic creation of the women’s collections at Christian Dior since 2016, wanted to pay homage to this “Miss Dior”, a cultural and commercial shift made by the iconic post-war fashion house .
New Look
We are in 1967: “Monsieur Dior” has been dead for 10 years and the haute couture house ventures beyond the closed salons of Avenue Montaigne to launch into ready-to-wear, inaugurating the era of “ reproducibility” of the models, now always set with a Dior logo.
The line is called “Miss Dior” and a few months before May 68, she dared to create feminine clothes with psychedelic touches, short, daring, likely to inspire a new generation of independent women.
PHOTO SCOTT A GARFITT, INVISION/ASSOCIATED PRESS
South Korean singer JISOO of the group Blackpink
The “Miss” is none other than Christian Dior’s sister, Catherine, a resistance fighter returned from the Ravensbrück concentration camp whose little-known destiny is currently being brought to the screen in the series New Look on Apple TV.
This American production shot in English addresses not only the character of the fashion designer (played by Australian actor Ben Mendelsohn) but also the fate of his sister Catherine played by Maisie Williams (Game Of Thrones).
“Miss Dior” is also available in beauty and perfumery, the brand which belongs to LVMH having simultaneously revisited the “Miss Dior” perfume with a new composition signed by the nose of the moment Francis Kurkdjian.
On the commercial side, Dior is a catapult that nothing can stop. The house whose growth has tripled over the last seven years, particularly after COVID-19, is seeking to make a shift towards “normalized” sales, in the words of Bernard Arnault, who appointed his daughter Delphine Arnault, director of the house Christian Dior since February 2023.