A cultural project, more than just a fashion show. An event of fashion, music, art, tradition and sense of community

Dior flies to Lecce for the Cruise 2021 collection . And the main reason for this choice is the memory that binds Maria Grazia Chiuri, Dior&#39;s creative director, to southern Italy and Puglia, the father&#39;s birth region, where she spent part of her childhood and to whom she remained very close . The region is also known for the many artisan and creative workers at all levels, from fashion to music, from sculpture to the art of ceramics to the design of the illuminations. A real &quot;project&quot; of solidarity, assonances and exceptional elective affinities.

&ldquo;In this period I have tried to give a new shape to working together. Despite the difficulties of the distance, assigning a perspective to the days has given us strength and imagination &quot; . Maria Grazia Chiuri had already decided, for the Cruise 2021 collection project, to reconnect her creative imagination to Puglia, the land of her heart. It was the reading of the texts of the anthropologist Ernesto De Martino dedicated to the traditions and rites of those territories, which influenced, in the study of the work of art, authors such as Germano Celant or Georges Didi-Huberman, to lead her to explore the its roots: Puglia, in which magical beliefs such as tarantism and fascination still operate, was then configured in this moment of crisis as a sort of concrete utopia through actions that use imagination and participation to create alternative ways of describing the world .

The Cruise collection created by Maria Grazia Chiuri is in fact like an a cappella song: the sculptor Pietro Ruffo has imagined a new Miss Dior, the famous floral motif of the maison (which also gives its name to a fragrance) in a more rustic version . A different narrative of nature that unfolds in long light cotton dresses, shirts and shorts. It is always Pietro Ruffo who creates a series of five cartouche flowers with mottos such as: &quot;Les Parfums sont les sentiments des fleurs 1 &quot; , for a new heraldry that takes inspiration from the illustrations contained in the 1638 book De Florum Cultura by Giovanni Battista Ferrari .

T he collaboration with the Le C Ostantine association , which includes a network of craftsmen, has allowed us to work with the tombolo processing techniques, the Fondazione Musica per la Taranta to integrate the sounds of the famous Apulian dance with a live performance. , the light designer Marinella Senatore with its baroque illuminations for the set up. The imposing lights that illuminated the show with a thousand rainbow lights, for a total of 30,000 bulbs and twelve days of work, represent the &quot;tailoring&quot; soul of the festivities of a fashion show, perhaps among the most emotional and exciting for Mara Grazie Chiuri. The concept also complements the presence of a line of ceramics from the Branca di Tricase company (the village where Maria Grazia&#39;s father was born) who created a collection of tarot cards for the occasion. Tarot cards that are part of the popular tradition, a journey between the sacred and the profane and not least a fascination towards the dark that Christian Dior himself has always had. Monsieur Dior founded the maison after the war, in 1947 with the advent of the New Look and it was in those dark and uncertain years that he sought the necessary tarot cards to keep going and ask questions on the return of his missing sister Catherine. Catherine Dior, the sister of the famous designer, was in fact one of the protagonists of the French resistance during the Second World War.

Ultimately, the new collection represents a warm welcome in the most intimate and emotional universe of Maria Grazia Chiuri, enriched with an aspirational tension that always refers to the history of Monsieur Dior and focuses entirely on the value of traditions, from tailoring to the artistic. Because fashion is much more than a series of looks, says Maria Grazia, fashion is culture.

Dior emotion: the Cruise 2021 show

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