“Dream comes true” for Maria Grazia Chiuri, but is she a “designer of dreams,” as Christian Dior himself was touted to be?

Just hours after the first day of the Donald Trump hush-money trial ended, Dior held their pre-fall show some eight kilometres from the much-followed legal drama, across the East river, in the Brooklyn Museum—the two-centuries old building that was once the Brooklyn Apprentices’ Library. (It was also here that the 2021 exhibition Christian Dior: Designer of Dreams was staged.) Although the worlds of the ex-US president and the luxury French brand are vastly apart, for today, they share something in common: America. One is about “an assault on America—nothing like this has ever happened before, there’s never been anything like it,” as Mr Trump ranted to the media before entering the courthouse. The other, specifically about the city of New York, which is “important but especially for my generation, because we are speaking about my generation, New York is the city,” as Maria Grazia Chiuri told WWD a day before the start of the Dior show.

Both Donald Trump and Christian Dior are, of course, connected to New York City by way of business. In 1948, when the Queens-born Mr Trump was just two, Mr Dior opened a “ready-to-wear house—the first of its kind”—according to Dior corporate literature—at the corner of 5th Avenue and 57th Street (now The Crown Building). It sat, interestingly, in the same stretch of Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue as the current Trump Tower: in fact, in a spot (it no longer exists) just diagonally opposite the gold-hued edifice. In the pre-show publicity that Ms Chiuri partook, she made no mention of the proximity of the first Dior outpost in the US then and the New York headquarters of the Trump organisation now. There is, of course, no direct link between the two men, but it is interesting that the offices that they opened were on the same street, even if generations apart.

Mr Trump is not the only American character that was evoked. The show is soundtracked by the music of New Yorker Yoko Ono, the Japanese-American composer/multi-media artist who married the slain Beatle John Lennon in 1969. The models strutted glumly to 1981’s Walking on Thin Ice, 1973’s Approximately Infinite Universe (co-produced with her husband John), and 2016’s Dogtown. While there are those who know Ms Ono as a singer/songwriter (also her role in the Plastic Ono Band) and a peace activist, not many are aware that she is also an artist, specifically, performance artist. In a debut act in Kyoto in 1964—seven years after Christian Dior died of a heart attack—called Cut Piece, Ms Ono invited members of the audience to go on stage to snip off her outfit (she wore a black, button-front dress) with a pair of scissors—they could keep the pieces—until she was naked. This, as some critics saw it, was a thesis on the opposing forces of control and capitulation. It was also then referred to as “feminist art”.

Ms Chiuri probably understood Ms Ono’s Cut Piece, if she was aware of it. The feminist message may reflect Ms Chiuri’s own, although she probably would not ask anyone to snip her designs to pieces, even if neon pairs of hands with thumbs and index fingers touching floated around the atrium of the museum. Her Dior, as she has envisioned, is less powerful, less provocative, less engaging of the mind. This season, she shows clothes that her New York fans presumably desire—wearable pieces that happily embraced Black aesthetics and American obsession with what cool French girls wear. But, the link between New York and Paris is, according to Ms Chiuri, really the singer-actress Marlene Dietrich, Mr Dior’s customer and friend. So, there are, unsurprisingly, menswear tailoring, workwear, and denim pieces. As well as aviator looks that recall another American woman, the flight pioneer Amelia Earhart, evening dresses that a modern-day Daisy Buchanan would adore, Statue of Liberty-printed pieces for nothing-better-to-buy tourists, and a few black dresses that Ms Ono might wear if she were to re-stage Cut Pieces. Only now, on the Dior runway, they stay boringly intact.

Screen shot (top): dior/YouTube. Photos: Dior