Contemplative haute couture at Dior, while Maria Grazia Chiuri talks with Isabella Ducrot

A moment of contemplation and a collection of very wearable pieces at Dior haute couture on Monday, on the opening day of the Paris season, in a show packed with powerful female stars.

Glenn Close, all dressed in impeccable white Dior, sat near Rihanna, dressed in diaphanous black, in the front row alongside former French first lady Carla Bruni, in a crisp white jacket, and the house's ambassador, Natalie Portman, wearing a miniskirt and a black jacket. , braving the cold winter day in Paris.

This season the couturier Dior joined forces with Isabella Ducrot, an artist born in Naples but based in Rome, whose gigantic installation great aura, they adorned the walls of the custom-built exhibition space in the gardens of the Rodin Museum.

About twenty five-meter-high dresses hung with pins on the walls, on wallpaper with irregular black stripes, which suggest the weft and warp of the fabric. All echoing the Ottoman sultan, the dresses studied by Ducrot.

Paraded before them was a cast that appeared for the first time in a great series of khaki looks, trench coats, dressed coats, cocktail trench coats. So good that they put Burberry to shame… But always with a soup of French delicacy.

Although often spare and carefully edited, the collection occasionally exploded into light, with organza nightgowns, dresses and pants shimmering with scrolls, swirls of foliage, beads, raffia and lacquered rhodoids. Parisian haute couture in its most delicate form.

Chiuri's favorite fabric for next spring was a new light moiré, in iridescent gold, white, gray, burgundy and green. Then, Chiuri said, “it rolls out during the winter like a wave.” Worn with truly chic new bar jackets and the classic Dior New Look full skirt, they looked like couture must-haves at first glance.

Backed by a soundtrack by sound architect Michelle Gaubert starring the soaring theme by Bjork and Rosalía. Oraland staged with excellent new casting from veteran Michelle Lee, this was a consummately professional show.

Chiuri explained that the idea of ​​installing Aura He refers to the fact that haute couture “is a perpetually fertile ground for contemplation where the reproduction of the original is never the same.” Just as each garment inevitably adapts to the body of the wearer and, therefore, carries its own specific aura.

Given that this was a couture collection, Chiuri's inspiration seemed surprising. Both she and the artist Ducrot cited Walter Benjamin and his famous work. The work of art in the era of mechanical production as inspiration, where he developed the concept of aura. It is a text long cited by Marxist theorists as a vitally important theoretical work.

All told, on a Haute Couture Monday that began with Schiaparelli's Paris Texas Haute Couture Fireworks, Chiuri's Dior was a much more restrained statement. But that's what makes Maria Grazia such a powerful designer. She makes clothes that women want to wear and in many situations, in many moods and in many moments.

“I discovered that my personality is always to want some functionality in everything I do. Each garment is a project, and I don't forget that. Where functionality must always be taken into account. So if I make a skirt, it should be a matter of a button or a belt that is easy to put on even in the rarefied world of haute couture,” Chiuri explained in a pre-show preview.