USING ITS RUNWAYS AS A TOOL TO REFRAME ART HISTORY, DIOR EXPANDS ITS BRAND UNIVERSE
Photo Courtesy of Dior
4 mar 2022, for frame
Location
Pl. de la Concorde, 75001 Paris, France
Design, Production
Architecture
Brand
Music
A Da Vinci masterpiece, among others, found new interpretations in the alternative gallery that was the French fashion house’s AW22 show.
Key features
Dior took the same 'black box' approach to its AW22 show as for the Dior SS22 Haute Couture fashion show. However, this season’s presentation saw a minimalistic white box placed in the gardens of Paris’ Jardin des Tuileries. The box’s façade was emblazoned, as usual, with the black script of Dior’s logo. Leonardo da Vinci’s portrait Lady with an Erminegreeted visitors at the entry – a white square covering the ermine obscured the painting’s identity. The Lady was positioned to symbolize The Next Era, an artwork by Italian artist Mariella Bettineschi and the basis of the show’s spatial concept. Bettineschi installed a gallery of cut-up, large-scale portraits of women painted from the 16th to the 19th century. The gallery’s interior was decked out in red velvet as if it were a classic interior of an opera house, revealing black-and-white portraits in golden frames.
Frame's take
The multilayered storytelling of the Dior AW22 space brings the use of art in a fashion show to a new, conceptual level. The intention of the show was to reposition the perception and preconception of fashion and space. Dior’s fashion collection does so with innovative materials and technology, its set with analogue methods – allowing only fragmented perception of the famous images, the audience was exposed to another reading of art history. Bettineschi’s work might be read as a reference to the ‘zero point of painting’ – AKA Malevich's Black Square.
If the Dior SS22 Haute Couture show proposed the reuse of an exclusive runway space for a publicly accessible exhibition to promote craft, the AW22 might be considered a substantial art project in itself. It displays the next era in fashion: the industry is making garment production processes more transparent for audiences to get better in touch with the brand.