Dior cheers rebel women in 1970s-tinted Paris show

Paris – Dior designer Maria Grazia Chiuri raided her
teenage diaries for a sometimes touching Paris fashion week show on Tuesday
that made the personal political.

The Italian — the first women to lead the mythic French fashion
house —
dived back into the 1970s when the women’s liberation movement was shaking
the
world and fashion with it.

The day after Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein was finally found
guilty of
rape by a US court, Chiuri sent her models out under three traffic
light-coloured neon signs flashing with the word “Consent”.

Several other neon signs hammered home the designer’s well-known
feminist
and environmental beliefs, including “Women’s Love is Unpaid Labour”, “When
Women Strike, the World Stops” and “Patriarchy = CO2”.

Others like “Women are the Moon that Moves the Tides” were quietly
poetic
but just as powerful.

Bandana scarves

Chiuri said her clothes were a contemporary take on the decade that
revolutionised relations between the sexes.

And the counterculture references were there from the start, with
most of
her models wearing bandana scarves on their heads.

Poncho coats, charm chains and shearling-lined suede boots and
typical
1970s checks and argyle patterns ran cheek by jowl with more restrained
black
Dior classics.

There were also glimpses of Chiuri’s schoolgirl past in a handful
of looks
where she teamed big very un-Dior work boots with clothes that had echoes of
customised school uniforms.

She also sent out a run of looks pairing lace knee-high socks with
Mary
Jane shoes.

Chiuri told AFP that she was transported back to the period reading
her
teenage diary, which contained quite a few surprises.

“I had not realised that all my references began to form during my
adolescence. The 1970s had a big influence on what made me,” the 57-year-old
said.
“Looking back now, I didn’t realise I was living through a real historic
moment.

“What influenced me most was how women began asserting themselves,
to show
that they were not only mothers, wives and daughters but that they had
several
aspects to themselves,” the designer added.

“I remember the women who would come to my mother’s dressmaking
shop and
who were defining themselves through their clothes and their way of being.”
With Hollywood stars including Demi Moore, Sigourney Weaver and Rachel
Brosnahan in the front row, the show was also a tribute to the Italian
feminist thinker and art critic Carla Lonzi.

Facing down Freud

Lonzi’s famous slogan “We are all Clitoridean Women” was also
turned into a
blazing red neon by the art collective Claire Fontaine for the show.

The line is a cheeky riposte to Freud, who Chiuri said considered
the
clitoral orgasm as “immature in relation to the vaginal one” and which
traditionally needed male intervention.

Chiuri has had a big effect on street fashion since she took the
reins at
Dior three years ago, bringing the beret back into fashion in her first two
shows.

As well as the bandana/gypsy scarves, her schoolgirl take on the
1970s is
likely to be widely copied, with ties under leather jackets, as well as her
vintage checks and argyles.

Watch out too for the new leather hybrid hat created by Dior’s British
hatter Stephen Jones, who crossed the beret with the gavroche cap.
(AFP)

Credit: Dior

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