Dior’s Creative Director Maria Grazia Chiuri has been hoping to stage a show in Mexico for almost seven years, and last night that ambition was finally realised. As biblical rain fell on Mexico City, Dior staged their Cruise 2024 show – a celebration of the country’s craftmanship, colour and heroine Frida Kahlo.
Frida Kahlo was the inspiration
In some ways, Chiuri had spent more like decades preparing for an homage to the Mexican artist. She’d first seen Kahlo’s work as a young woman, visiting an exhibition in Rome and was blown away by the artist’s life. ‘Everybody looks more at the iconography of her artwork in a superficial way, but honestly her life is incredible because she had a relationship with her body and her clothes,’ Chiuri says of Kahlo, who was born with polio and then suffered a horrific tram accident that left her with limited movement, in constant pain and unable to have children. ‘She was so conscious of that.’
Delving into Kahlo’s backstory, Chiuri was inspired by the way in which the artist used her clothes to fashion her identity – something she expertly honed with 54 of her 114 pieces of art in her life being self-portraits.
Dig out your peasant blouses
Those portraits formed the basis for the collection. Some references were overt: the pink dress reminiscent of one worn by Kahlo in a famous painting, for example. Others, meanwhile, were more subtle: think the square neck neckline you last saw in a peasant blouse you picked up in the year 2000, but now is the height of fashion again. Or the strong line of suits: a reference to the gender fluid style Kahlo favoured.
Save up for a butterfly hair belts
Kahlo, too, was the reason that the main motif of the show wasn’t Christian Dior’s bumblebee, but rather a butterfly. Legend has it that when Kahlo was forced to lie in bed due to her chronic condition, her friend artist Isamu Noguchi gifted her a collection of butterflies, which he screwed to the ceiling above her bed. As such, Kahlo would have been impressed with the layers of butterflies in the collection. Printed butterfly motifs printed and sewn onto dresses… butterfly belts, worn on waists and hips, again not seen since Sienna Miller’s height-of-boho days… Bags embellished with leather butterflies – let alone the butterfly shaped mini evening bag…. And butterfly hairclips, earrings and multi-strand necklaces, that spawn a thousand replicas.
Alicia Keys sat front row
Millennial-favourite singer Alicia Keys was one of the guests sitting front row who will remember the noughtie’s obsession with butterfly belts well. Daisy Jones and the Six actor Riley Keough, who joined her, maybe less so. But afterwards she could be seen trading notes with Hollywood legend Naomi Watts about their favourite pieces. Despite their very different styles, they would all have found something that suited them in this show: from matchy-matchy denim to stealth-wealth capes and coats.
Local Mexican artisans were drafted in to work with Dior’s Maria Grazia Chirui on the collection
But whilst Chiuri's collections are selling – Dior’s revenue estimated to have doubled from €2.9bn in 2018 to €6.2bn in 2021 – what she appears most interested in is using these Cruise shows to highlight the local artisans. In this instance, this meant teaming up with three experts in Mexican craftmanship to get them to work with her on key pieces of the collection. The result was Dior’s famous Bar jackets embroidered with symbols of nature and geometric patterns by seamstresses in Oaxaca as well as traditional items, such as tunics and shirts, woven by other craftsman spread out across Mexico. There was even a spin on the sombrero, made by Alema Atelier – one of a number Chiuri hopes to continue to support even long after the Cruise roadshow leaves Mexico.
