Written by Cassell Ferere

Maria Grazia Chiuri, the womenswear designer for Dior, has had time to play dress-up with her dolls when she was younger. She presented her Autumn/Winter 2020-2021 Haute Couture collection as miniature gowns fit for any Barbie, or G.I. Joe figurine you may have stashed away in your box of nostalgia. 

In a film titled “Le Mythe Dior” which was directed by Italian filmmaker Matteo Garrone, a favorite of Grazia Chiuri, fantasy and inanimate miniature gowns are brought to life. In the fashion of "Theatre De la Mode," when artists and fashion designers collaborated during World War II in France, Dior has brought back to life the surreal worlds that were created by designers and couturiers.

The display of dolls in the fashion of the time was a world away from the one lived in. During the 1940s "Theatre De La Mode" was an escape of the turmoil that Europe was suffering from.

Creating these 37 couture dresses took just as much painstaking work as any couture dress would take, as can be seen in videos on Dior’s website. And each dress carries and luster that is of fantasy and unbelievable scale to reality. The dresses uphold the mastery that is couture, fluid, and feminine, braided accents, velvet materials, popping color, hand-pleated with classic drapery.

“Surrealist images manage to make visible what is in itself invisible. I’m interested in mystery and magic, which are also a way of exorcising uncertainty about the future,”

 says Maria Grazia Chiuri of her haute couture collections on the Dior site.

The trunk which can house up to 10 gowns [visibly] is a replica of the 30 Avenue Montaigne where the house of Dior is located in the city of Paris. And in the film “Le Mythe Dior,” you can see this trunk being carried throughout the whimsical forest by two bell boys.

They approach each scene with caution, unveiling the contents of the trunk, Dior autumn/winter 2020-2021 haute couture dresses, which the women make romanticized selections over. 

Women who swim in the river, a statuesque women perched on a rock, a snail lady, and a woman kissing a man set within the roots at the base of a tree, are all measured and fitted into a dress. Dresses are seen in full-scale mid-scene at the Dior atelier in a single tracking shot that widens to reveal the dresses and ateliers. 

The trunk travels through the film as the "Theatre De La Mode" once did when it toured Europe and the United States in the mid-1940s. At the end of the film, you can see these women, the characters from the film, in this fantasy, dressed in their desired haute couture gown by Grazia Chiuri for Dior. Capturing the Dior savior faire of the ateliers in this collection, in this way, is a nostalgic, yet refreshing take on couture. 

This film and the miniature designs take the fantasy that fashion can be and reinvigorates it. With surreal intent, Grazia Chiuri mesmerizes our imagination while using the scale of the dresses to lure in the curious and fashion enthused.

See film here.

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