D’amblée, the spoiler. This time, a little literal. The announcement of the Athenian Dior fashion show for the Cruise 2022 collection – the first with a live audience after fifteen months, because it finally starts again – had generated plausible expectations of peplums and goddesses and laurel wreaths and sandals and arrows and quivers and mythologies assorted. But no, even if the peplos and goddesses were there, complete with trains and twirls of golden fringes, but in gymnastic shoes.
This time the context does not influence the content, at least not in an obvious way: the artistic director Maria Grazia Chiuri chooses the magnificently Olympic setting of the Panathenaic stadium – that of the first Olympics, to understand, with the memories of the classic games and the stone marvel of marble Pentelic, white and marked by centuries of history – to talk about something else. That is, of dynamism and athleticism – which given the place is consequential, but for Dior it is a frisson of slight change of image – but above all of craftsmanship linked to the territory and the unanimous nature of creation.
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The obsession with doing, the persistent desire to discover techniques close to oblivion and to support those who pass them down, as well as to promote those who invent new processes, in short, the care of the object are the real strength of Chiuri, the sign powerful that distinguishes it in a crowded system of pale figures. This would already be enough: beyond frantic tales and leaps between cultural theory and feminism – lately, it must be said, resized – the product should always speak. And Chiuri’s products for Dior speak frankly, so much so that they have already retained crowds of women with generous spending power: they are immediate, highly recognizable, they immediately create status.
The same customers, of this new resort collection, will strongly want, it is easy to predict, the anoraks with the prints of the athletes of the Attic vases interpreted by Pietro Ruffo, the embroidered jackets and bags by Aristeidis Tzonevrakis, the hats made with Atelier Tsalavoutas. There is a lot, even too much: the parade is as giant as the stadium, and summarizes all sports imagery that goes from basketball to tennis to racing to fencing to boats. The volumes are wide, with the shorts reminiscent of basketball shorts; the classic new look silhouettes leave room for something more decisive, androgynous and metropolitan – with echoes of Bottega Veneta in the gigantism of accessories and of Louis Vuitton in the touches of athletic futurism.
In 1951, Christian Dior had paraded at the Parthenon. The photos of the time are a riot of corolla dresses. Exactly seventy years later, Dior returns to Athens with a memorable show populated by women who are no longer dolls but willful athletes, in protective bibs and boots. Clothes do not force the body into a static ideal but liberate it. The leap forward is, with one eye, sacrosanct, to what it sells – never had a Dior been seen so varied and desirable. The only flaw, on this occasion of a brilliant restart, is the final swan dress: not very useful for the narration, and, although inspired by a photo of Marlene Dietrich from 1935, too similar to a creation by Marjan Pejoski that Bjork wore in Cannes in 2001, soon became one of the most controversial dresses in red carpet history. The controversy, here, is not for Dior. Not now and not in this setting after such an exciting show.