How many times must they shout Miss Dior?
At least a dozen times. And that's not counting the repeated text—monogram style—on shirts. Have Dior garments (and they are just that) become so excruciatingly ho-hum that a small logo isn't sufficient? So, a larger-than-mastheads 'Miss Dior' in long hand (some call it "graffiti"!) is necessary to lift select pieces of the collection to whatever level that Maria Grazia Chiuri dreamed of? Conspicuous brand names on clothes are nothing new, in free-hand text too. Ms Chiuri's Miss Dior treatment brought to mind the recent collaboration between the artist Eric Stefanski and the Japanese bag brand Porter. Designers these days really need not possess the skill to, say, pivot darts. More than anything, they require the flair to place logos. When you must send out staples, such as trench coats or sensible suits, the thing to distinguish them is plonk a recognisable name on them. And to make them younger, give someone a paint brush or spray can.
The use of the title and proper noun, Miss Dior, on clothes now blurred the lines between fashion and fragrance. It is hard, therefore, to differentiate the RTW with the GWP (at a Dior cosmetics counter). Miss Dior—the fragrance—first appeared in 1947, not long after Christian Dior's New Look took the world by storm. It has enjoyed several iterations and the latest, Miss Dior 2024, is reimagined by Francis Kurkdjian, and is described as a scent that "embraces tradition and modernity". Just like Maria Grazia Chiuri? The original parfum, a largely floral chypre, was created as homage to Mr Dior's sister Catherine (those who knew her called her Miss Dior), who is remembered as a French resistance fighter and is the subject of the biography Miss Dior: A Wartime Story of Courage and Couture.
In the book, author Justine Picardie notes that Catherine Dior "appears to be wearing her clothes simply to get on with life, rather than as a means to display her brother's consummate artistry". The same could, perhaps, be said of Maria Grazia Chiuri. Her output for Dior increasingly straddles the vacuous and nothing-much-to-look-at. She offers smart clothes, to be sure, but they are indeed those with which to truly just get on, with whatever, if not life. Much of the present offerings were familiar pieces in just-as-familiar silhouettes. Wardrobe staples for those wardrobes already overflowing with staples. She repeated her colour stories (opening with khaki, again. We reminded ourselves that it's a shade adopted by the mid-nineteenth century Indian army, whose chromatic preference is named after the Urdu word for "soil-colored") and stayed resolutely to "easy shapes", attributed to the '60s when Marc Bohan (who passed away last year, aged 97) was the main man and when Dior embraced prêt-à-porter. Ms Chiuri looked back once again to the work of past Dior designers, but, in modernising the past, she discounted the excitement of the present. And in case you couldn't be certain that it was the autumn/winter season, she gave you a sheer top with a very discernible bra.
The show felt like a museum exhibition come to life. Night at the Museum: Costume Institute? In the middle of the circus of the runway, five cage-armours and tribal figures by Shakuntala Kulkarni, the Bombay-based artist known to "highlight the plight of urban women" and the confines of their spaces, were placed like mannequins in a Dior store. That Ms Chiuri would highlight the work of a female artist is not surprising. That she used no feminist catchphrase on her clothes is. As one SOTD reader, who texted us from New York, said, "Has she run out of slogans?" Her counterpart Kim Jones, steering the menswear, offered a lesson in 2020 on how to say Dior. Ms Chiuri preferred to salute a Dior that was not directly linked to the house. There could, of course, be many possibilities here, but it was, as it was tempting to say, missed opportunities. Very Missed.
Screen shot (top): dior/YouTube. Photos: Dior
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