A constellation of places that generate emotions. This is Mexico for Maria Grazia Chiuri, a “place of the soul” as it was for surrealist artists from Leonora Carrington to Remedios Varo or for Tina Modotti, who of Mexico interpreted landscapes and people with her photos.
The iconic figure of Frida Kahlo remains a powerful connector to the culture of this land, celebrated at the heart of this Dior cruise 2024 collection. Artist who transcends her body through clothes that become representation, protest, affirmation. A casket for a broken body. A casket in which a hidden butterfly becomes a motif declined in many colors and shapes in a series of prints. Nocturnal butterflies that come to life on silhouettes, from a drawing by Andrée Brossin de Méré recovered in the Dior archives. Maria Grazia Chiuri wanted to be inspired by the photographs of Frida Kahlo, which challenge the boundaries of male-female gender. From the age of nineteen, Frida wore a three-piece suit, transgressing her femininity to claim an independence that was first and foremost intellectual. The clothes thus pay homage to her style; a counterpoint to the shapes, an echo of the Tehuana tradition, the wide skirt is worn with a traditional tunic: the huipil.
For this new line, unveiled in Mexico, Maria Grazia Chiuri always builds relationships with local savoir-faire, and excellent artisans: original embroideries and co-creations made with their workshops adorn, in particular, dress and shirts.
We find a pink dress, like the one dear to Frida Kahlo, which appears on one of her self-portraits. That fragility kneaded with beauty is rendered by the variety of laces in cotton, hemp and silk, by the minute designs of collars that illuminate jersey and black velvet, or that become wide full skirts with butterfly inlays. Velvet that returns in an incredible palette of colors in skirts that mark the hips thanks to pleats, and then open into a corolla shape. More butterflies in the toile de jouy inspired by Mexican flora and fauna with parrots, monkeys, and strelitzias that also recur in Frida’s paintings.
The intimate, sentimental dimension that guided Chiuri is also reflected in the choice of the fashion show venue: the Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso where the iconic Mexican painter studied. A symbolic place where she met Diego Rivera, the master, the love of her whole life. In this privileged space will take place the performance of Mexican feminist artist Elina Chauvet Mexico becomes a place of the heart, which tells – through the emotional modulations and the chromatic and material vividness of the collection – a femininity that is built through the relationship with the natural environment, and that is defined between activist posture and light delicacy.