Dior chose Athens, an exceptional destination – the cradle of Western civilization and of European arts – to present its Cruise 2022 collection.
In the heart of the city dedicated to Athena, Maria Grazia Chiuri reinvents her genealogy and tweaks House codes like the peplum.
In that spirit, she created her own map of Greece, informed by the personalities and images that nourished her references and poetry, from the works of Giorgio De Chirico to vases decorated with wrestling matches by Alexandre Iolas.
Giant silhouettes stand out in close-up on sketches by the artist Pietro Ruffo or are camouflaged on a selection of sportswear pieces.
A series of white trouser suits evoking those worn by Marlene Dietrich structure a lexicon balanced between classicism and freedom: oversized houndstooth becomes Hellenized, the cannage motif takes on new abstractions, a star appears. An alliance of heritage and modernity that – within the iconic Panathenaic Stadium, the setting for the show – reveals a manifesto for a body that more than ever enjoys the liberty of movement, performing without constraint.
The Dior Cruise 2022 Collection
A series of photographs of one of Monsieur Dior’s haute couture lines, taken near the iconic Pantheon in 1951, was the inspiration for the Dior Cruise 2022 collection.
In the heart of the city dedicated to Athena, Maria Grazia Chiuri reinvents her genealogy and tweaks the codes, art lies not in the object created, but in one’s ability to create, such as the peplum.
The goddess tunic, evoking marble and ancient statuary, is resolutely ethereal thanks to its fabrics and handmade pleats, a chiaroscuro is fluting.
A rediscovery of civilization’s roots – not out of nostalgia, but out of a desire to recompose, in the present, the fragmentation necessary to our understanding of the world.
Maria Grazia Chiuri was inspired by Giorgio De Chirico, a pioneer of Surrealism who drew on poignant memories of Greece to paint metaphysical places frozen in silent contrast of light and shadow.
The Creative Director then explored the universe of Alexander Iolas, the cosmopolitan gallery owner who preserved his close ties to Greece and his home in Athens.
There, he assembled an incredible collection of vases decorated with the intertwined bodies of wrestlers.
Giant close-ups of those silhouettes stand out in sketches by the artist Pietro Ruffo or are camouflaged on a selection of sportswear pieces, a synthesis of technical and formal research, the backbone and manifesto of a body performing beyond gender boundaries, in Panathenaic stadium where the cruise show is staged.
That body dons a series of white suits – jackets and pants – like those worn by Marlene Dietrich, structuring a sartorial lexicon poised between classicism and freedom: the oversized houndstooth is Hellenizes; cannage reveals new abstractions.
Gold dialogues with white: a hood grafted onto different looks is line punctuation, on engraved inscription.
Greek blue become both a signature and an homage.
Each collection is an ongoing reflection on the paradigms that distinguish fashion and the House of Dior; an occasion to further expand collective work.
Maria Grazia Chiuri underscores the extent to which the variations on femininity in Dior creations emerge from a past that honors a beauty with multiple facets.
