For Dior, The Past is Always Present

by Natasha Wolff | February 14, 2022 6:54 pm

For Dior’s Cruise 2022 collection[1], the French fashion house and its acclaimed creative director Maria Grazia Chiuri[2] chose Greece[3], and more specifically the Parthenon in Athens, to stage its fashion show. In ancient times, games in honor of the goddess Athena were held in this hallowed marble stadium, which once accommodated up to 70,000 spectators in the Greek capital. “Showing the Cruise 2022 collection in Greece was like meeting with the roots of our culture,” says Chiuri. “A culture in which exercising the body mirrored exercising the mind. I could say that the idea that guided me when defining the photoshoot was one of sharing, while time stands still, a vision of art and fashion as being complementary. Choreographing bodies, attitudes and imagination, all in harmony with our heritage, in this present moment free from nostalgia but conscious of our shared values.”

This series of photographs captured in the heart of Athens’ exceptional archeological site pays tribute to the photographs of Monsieur Dior’s haute couture line taken in 1951 next to the iconic Parthenon

This spirit of sports and culture served to inform the ethereal collection as well as a series of photographs unearthed from the archives of one of Christian Dior’s haute couture lines taken in front of the Parthenon by photographer Jean-Pierre Pedrazzini for Paris Match in 1951. “These images clearly express Dior[4]’s great love of art and his wish to reconstruct his own map of beauty, uniting fashion and art,” says Chiuri. “Through the collaboration with the Greek Ministry of Culture and the director of these archaeological sites like no other, we were granted special permission to reactivate, here and now, their atmospheres with the intention of sharing with the world the idea of beauty that steers my work, a beauty that includes cultures and stories.”

Draped grecian dresses, white pantsuits à la Marlene Dietrich and sporty Aegean blue-and-white-printed separates are standouts of this collection. The collection was captured by Greek photographer Ria Mort. “The power of Ria Mort’s photographs lies in the absolute nature of their subjects,” explains Chiuri. “The temples that were the roots of architecture, and the women who stare right into the lens, telling their story of our world with no hidden artifice other than the force of the clothing that combines past and future, passion and experimentation.”

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