It was the exhibition that drew millions of visitors between Paris’s Musée des Arts Decoratifs and then London’s Victoria & Albert Museum. “Christian Dior, Designer of Dreams,” which coincided with the maison’s 70th anniversary, saw people line up for hours for the opportunity to explore more than seventy years of creation. At the Paris location alone, 3000 m2 were lent to the exhibition space, making it the biggest exhibition ever dedicated to fashion in Paris. The exhibition called on curators Florence Müller and Olivier Gabet who offered a thematic and chronological itinerary via a virtuoso scenography. It featured archival photographs, sketches by Monsieur Dior, but also his successors—Yves Saint Laurent, Marc Bohan, Gianfranco Ferré, John Galliano, Raf Simons, and Maria Grazia Chiuri. Some 150 precious pieces and even more objects were exhibited and now can be re-explored through a lens that is even more intimate than ever.
“Couture, for me, is timeless in any case,” says creative director Chiuri. “Couture deals with craftsmanship, it has to project a fantasy. It has to maintain the same quality, the same values, of the couture houses. I never forget it. But, at the same time the audience is different. I think that the New Look is an emblem of our heritage, but at the same time, it’s important to innovate. Because the lifestyle is completely different from the Fifties.” Chiuri continues, adding to her contemporary vision of today’s maison Dior, “Today , I think that it’s not possible to speak only about clothes. We are speaking about women, people. My dialogue is with my time. So I think it’s very important to express that we are all different.”
The maison Dior agrees that regardless where or who you are, dreams are essential to one’s essence and in that vein invites everyone behind-the-scenes the epic exhibition in the video above.
