The reality of a building is defined by its interior space, its living space, the space we inhabit; the same applies to architecture as to fashion. It is in this realm, which we can consider a borderland, that the relationship between body and garment is woven, differing according to custom.Between the garment for the body and the body for the garment.
For the Dior Fall 2025 collection, Maria Grazia Chiuri intends to explore and connect the area that determines the clothing habits of cultures round the world. She thus studies the garment in two and three dimensions, as exemplified by the kimono jacket following on from Monsieur Dior who, for autumn-winter 1957, created the Diorpaletot and Diorcoat, designed to be worn over a kimono while respecting its shape. Then, in the continuous interplay of inspirations and references that constitutes fashion, an album relating a journey to Japan – where Marc Bohan’s Dior models were unveiled in Tokyo in 1971 – establishes a dialogue with the spellbinding characters of Japanese theater.
Also located in this imaginary cartography is the exhibition Love Fashion: In Search of Myself,* which the Creative Director of Dior women’s lines visited in Kyoto. An odyssey which, by confronting two distinct fashion cultures, conveys the singular attitude of bodies and the complexity of the emotions that pervade them through the cut of garments: the body, identity and desire are the main themes addressed.
Maria Grazia Chiuri operates in the field of fashion around a kind of material soul where the garment is the body: a contemporary body that integrates the equation of the Kimono and the quality of the textile into the architecture inherent in the Creative Director’s DNA. This is how jackets and coats with generous, enveloping lines, sometimes belted, have been developed. Precious garments, both for their fabric, silk, and for the sketch of a Japanese garden that accompanies the silhouette.
Wide pants and long skirts undulate with every step and movement. This is a metamorphic collection, where black remains intense, deep; where the captivating narrative of floral patterns becomes a print in itself; where the inlay of golden embroidery expresses the marvelous desire that always flows through fashion and its creators.
This new line oscillates between clothing shapes that represent cultures in our collective consciousness. It engages in conversations that suggest new solutions within this perspective, linking fashion to architecture and, in its most intimate aspect, placing the body, bodies, at its heart.
*Co-organized by the Kyoto Costume Institute and The National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, where this exhibition took place, from September 13 to November 24, 2024.
