Maria Grazia Chiuri channels Georgia O’Keefe and the American West, presenting her 2018 cruise collection in the Santa Monica mountains.
Why California? Dior’s artistic director, Maria Grazia Chiuri, candidly admitted that the location was chosen before her arrival at the house, yet when presented with the California location, Chiuri said she went to the archives, where she came across the house founder’s Lascaux collection of 1951, inspired by the ancient cave paintings discovered in southwestern France a decade earlier.
Chiuri reproduced the Lascaux sketches as a silk and raffia jacquard used on New Look skirts and ponchos, as a print on a softer cotton shirtwaist dress, and as fur intarsias. Chief among her other interests this season were a Georgia O’Keeffe exhibition she saw at the Brooklyn Museum and a collaboration with Vicki Noble, the creator of the Motherpeace feminist tarot deck. From her start at Dior, Chiuri has linked magic with femininity and feminism. Here, she went direct to the source, printing T-shirts with Noble’s tarot illustrations or painting them on the back of leather Perfectos, giving the entire collection a magical charm. As for O’Keeffe, milliner Stephen Jones’s parson’s hats were dead ringers for the topper the artist wore, and a double-face cashmere coat in black with white arabesques evoked her famous ram’s head paintings.
