Paris: Dior went back to nature on Tuesday in his Paris Fashion Week show with Greta Thunberg braids and a collection inspired by the garden that seemed to jump directly from the earth.
With climate change biting at the heels of fashion industry, and the London shows struck by environmental protests, designer Maria Grazia Chiuri said she wanted to make clothing that “not only went about image but action”.
To do that, she embraced the game, with hemp garden jackets and a series of beautiful Diafanous dresses embroidered with wild flowers.
These were not the elegant pink roses from Dior Yore but winding survivors, thistles and other spiky customers who flourished on Stoney Ground.
Most of her models also wore their hair in braids that are not uneven in relation to those of the Teenage Swedish environmental activist Thunberg.
Three of the most striking looks wore the spooky prints of real wild flowers, collected and applied by an artist who has mastered natural technology.
The Italian designer also shifted the couture boundaries by using hemp and raffia on eye-causing unusual ways, with a layered raffia ball gown and flower-defended raffia vests.
Everything took place in what Chiuri called an “inclusive garden” of 160 trees, their roots wrapped in hemp, all of which will be planted in urban gardens designed around the French capital by environmental architects, Coloco.
Chiuri said AFP that her inspiration had come from the sister Catherine of Christian Dior, a French resistance hero that became the first female floral wholesaler in Paris – and who was edited her own roses in the Luberon in the south of France.
– resistance hero –
The first perfume of her couturier brother, Miss Dior, was named after her and Chiuri felt that her legacy had forgotten a bit.
Catherine led a network for collecting resistance information from Dior’s apartment in Paris during the German Nazi occupation of France.
When she was arrested, she refused to betray her comrades, even though she was tortured by the Gestapo and sent to a concentration camp.
Chiuri said she was struck by a meaning of her own brother after the war: “Fortunately there are the flowers” – which she took as a sign of hope after the dark days of the Second World War.
“Flowers and people must live together if humanity has to survive,” she said AFP.
“The important issue for everyone, not just in fashion, is to be more responsible about what we do,” she said.
“These are not classic decorative flowers, but artistic. It is not only about image, but also action … The important problem for everyone, not just fashion, is to be more responsible about what we do,” she added.
With Dior nowadays almost as many headlines with his hats, Chiuri was at the top all her looks with a spray of straw hats from the British Millinery Guru Stephen Jones.
Jones told AFP that his “eyes light up” when he met a recently discovered garden hat that Catherine gave her brother and pulled out many of his designs.
