For this fall-winter 2024-2025 Dior ready-to-wear fashion show, Maria Grazia Chiuri reflected on the transition era of the late 1960s, when fashion left the atelier to conquer the world. Hence the birth in 1967 of Miss Dior, a women’s line that introduced ready-to-wear and was entrusted by Marc Bohan to his assistant Philippe Guibourgé. The challenge for fashion then was to create clothes that could be reproduced and that were especially suitable for the pace of a life where imagination was predominant. In the dynamic context of an increasingly complex and ever-evolving society, we moved from the landscape of the body to that of the globe. Thus, visual culture brought together art, fashion, architecture, and music to devise a spontaneous fresco, a form of expression without precedent. Gabriella Crespi, a fascinating source of inspiration for Marc Bohan, was an artist and designer, a cosmopolitan creator, and for Maria Grazia Chiuri, she symbolises that pioneering generation of independent women determined to make a name for themselves through their work. Many of her objects and artistic pieces contributed to the success of Dior garments in those years. Marc Bohan changed the language of fashion through Miss Dior, because it is the line that has to lead to a product that has a different functionality. You can see that there was a radical change, pants, underwear and scarves appear that are almost a manifesto of the new course.
“Marc Bohan’s intuition to create Miss Dior was a revolution, but we do not realise it believing that the fashion system has always been as we know it.”
The collection celebrates the shapes and materials that, at the opening of the Miss Dior boutique in Paris, gave impetus to a new way of dressing that could unite numerous women and make them all special. The scarf, dear to Maria Grazia Chiuri, is once again the must-have accessory. In everyday life, at work or when traveling, the scarf is adjustable and compact, protective, embracing, and decorative as required. Free and fluid silhouettes, like those in the A-line, facilitate movement towards new horizons, enhancing the woman’s body without constraining it. The colors echo the range of Marc Bohan: white, orange, pink, neon green, with shades adapted to makeup. The pieces are mostly in double cashmere, as well as in gabardine, including dresses, pants, coats, jackets, and skirts cut above the knee. The Miss Dior logo is represented as a signature manifesto in a palette of blues, reds, and browns. Studs are replaced by beads, and embroidery makes a bold impact. Models move amidst an installation designed by Indian artist Shakuntala Kulkarni, which explores the female body and its relationship with urban spaces. The looks convey the radiant strength of a pluralistic, autonomous, and versatile femininity, reactivating that key moment of creative freedom of which Miss Dior is the emblem. An installation conceived by artist Shakuntala Kulkarni for the autumn-winter 2024-2025 ready-to-wear fashion show by Dior conceived by Maria Grazia Chiuri.
This collection challenges female subjectivity, not only from the perspective of the body and its social and political vulnerability, but above all from its power in relation to urban space and the social system in which we evolve.
Born in 1950 in Karnataka, Shakuntala Kulkarni is an Indian artist living in Mumbai. Her work explores the relationship between the female body and public and private urban spaces. This body has often been represented and perceived as lacking in strength, in terms of physical, muscular strength, whose primacy has been conferred to men. Inserted into the heart of the city, the body cannot be neutral, as it is interconnected with material, symbolic, and sociological definitions. It is always situated, occupying its position and location in the world and therefore represents the primary means of a political relationship, as it returns subjectivity to its exposed, gendered, and plural dimension. A female body, outside the domestic sphere, becomes a social construction. In her series “of bodies, armours, and cages”, Shakuntala Kulkarni uses cane, a flexible and elastic medium, and in 2016, she also produced a video titled Juloos, in which she plays the lead role, evolving as a female warrior, wearing a helmet and other cane elements. In the installation placed at the center of the fashion show for the autumn-winter 2024-2025 ready-to-wear fashion show by Dior conceived by Maria Grazia Chiuri, at the Jardin des Tuileries, the artist unveils, alongside her sculptures, various excerpts from this film. Printed on canvas, they integrate the elements of the set to give the whole a performative essence. Rediscovering the fighting strength that a woman’s body can embody is a key point in the personal, political, and cultural journey of feminist liberation, a current theme prevalent in many parts of the world.
