UK Edition
Inside Christian Dior: Designer of Dreams - the summer blockbuster fashion exhibition
This year has been a bumper year for the quality and quantity of beautifully curated fashion exhibitions. Ever since the runaway success of Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2011, these blockbuster shows have had a seismic effect in bringing down the average age of museum attendees and steering venerable institutions into pop cultural consciousness, and at the same time re-contextualising the brands and reigniting passions and curiosity.
Spread over 3,000 square metres of Paris’s Museé Arts Décoratifs, and featuring over 300 dresses from the house’s own archive, as well as loans from museums and private collections, Christian Dior: Designer of Dreams is the largest exhibition in any discipline to be shown at the space.
Curated by Florence Müller, the show is broken down into 23 different themes with dedicated rooms exploring the work of the individual creative directors who followed Christian Dior himself: Marc Bohan, Yves Saint Laurent, Gianfranco Ferré, John Galliano, Raf Simons, and the current director Maria Grazia Chiuri.
The dresses sit amongst art, furniture and objets d’art, chosen by Olivier Gabet, the museum’s director, to contextualise the fashion pieces. In the first room a painting by Salvador Dali sits opposite an early Dior dress; works by Sterling Ruby complement sculptural creations by Raf Simons (Ruby and Simons’ mutual inspiration was immortalised in the film Dior and I).
Rooms capture different settings - a boudoir, a garden, a gallery and a street - culminating in a vast recreation of the Hall of Mirrors at the Palais de Versailles. Private letters, accessories, tools, works-in-progress and never-before-seen pieces make this the ultimate show for any fashion devotee, let alone Dior fanatic.
Christian Dior has always sat at the forefront of the great fashion houses, with a legacy cemented by the iconic New Look, the longer skirts and fabrics a response to what women, following the privations of the Second World War, actually wanted to wear. Single-handedly setting the agenda of post-war dressing, Dior has remained at the vanguard whilst sensitively aware of its client's needs. Given the illustrious names that have helmed the house, perhaps few other brands are more suited to the grand sweeping narrative proposed by this ambitious show.
Dior has always been an adept innovator in communication: the brand produces multiple exhibitions around the world (in fact, top archive pieces are being shared between the show in Paris and the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, Australia which will open another 70 year anniversary exhibition this August), and runs its own museum in Christian Dior’s Granville home. It publishes a quarterly magazine, three or four books a year with partners such as Assouline and Rizzoli and produced the documentary Dior and I.
With this exhibition, however, both Dior and MAD have surpassed themselves. Whirling through the many rooms, the varied identities of Christian Dior come to life and one is made aware of what together all of these strands – the ineffable essence of Dior, a unique femininity combined with luxury and intelligence.
Christian Dior: Designer of Dreams, Museé Arts Décoratifs, 107 Rue de Rivoli, Paris. Runs until 7 January 2018; lesartsdecoratifs.fr