The Dior house, presented the spring-summer 2019 couture collection at the Musée Rodin in Paris. The inspiration for this collection comes from the circus universe. This fabulous creative chaos is the starting point of Maria Grazia Chiuri for this haute couture collection. The visual sequence of the pieces that compose it explodes the memory and imagination that inhabit the circus and its relationship to costumes, fashion and art, to the evocation of the work that Cindy Sherman devotes to clowns.
This collection consists of a superposition of images: a woman’s tattooed skin, reminiscent of the Victorian circus and its fairground phenomena, becomes a motif-drenched unitard that shapes the body and tells a wearable story under dresses. Powdery shades that come together and blend into an infinite palette – like those on the curtain painted by Pablo Picasso for the ballet Parade – also symbolize this sense of the worn, of the fine dust that sprinkles stage clothes. Skirts embroidered or inlaid with opaque sequins are shortened as tutus that nod to the circus codes of acrobats, tamers and riders.
The show is animated with performances by the all-female circus company Mimbre, which, in a constant search for the poetic in the unexpected, highlights the trust and bond between the acrobats’ bodies. The circus is presented as a place of inclusion in which the clown, through its androgynous and asexual dimension, becomes the expression of a possible equality and an evocation of modernity, one where beauty, origin, gender and age are no longer important, and only technique and daring matter.
Photos: Dior