ReportageAfter Morocco, Italy and Greece, the artistic director of the Dior house called on Spanish craftsmen with unique know-how for her cruise 2023 collection. The show, which was held in Seville in June, thus showcased local hand-embroidery techniques.
“Frankly, even today, I have no idea how Maria Grazia Chiuri managed to find me”, wonders María José Sánchez Espinar in her small studio in Villamanrique de la Condesa, about forty kilometers southwest of Seville, Spain. For Dior’s Cruise 2023 show, she made two embroidered Manila shawls adorned with characteristic long fringes.
The first, black with white floral embroidery, even opened the show on the shoulders of a model wearing men’s shoes, a tank top and suspender pants. Shaved head, intense blue eyes, hands in her pockets, she seemed as feminine as any flamenco dancer in a large ruffled petticoat. The beauty and determined air of the young woman had a lot to do with it. The evocative power of the shawl too. As well as the reference to Carmen Amaya (1913-1963), flamenco legend who was one of the few women to wear pants to perform her choreographies.
The “Capitana”, as she was nicknamed, inspired Maria Grazia Chiuri, artistic director of the women’s collections at Dior, for this parade which was held on June 16 in the majestic Spanish Square of the Andalusian capital.
A dialogue with local crafts
For more than four years, Maria Grazia Chiuri has been digging the furrow of local craftsmanship, particularly in the context of Dior’s cruise collections. In Marrakech (Morocco), in April 2019, in Lecce (Italy), in July 2020, and in Athens (Greece), in June 2021.
“I’m not necessarily looking for a direct link between Mr. Dior and the city I choose. The idea is rather to be faithful to this habit he had of traveling. When he created his fashion house, Christian Dior immediately set out to promote it around the world and began to engage in dialogue with people there. He was going to sell his patronages to boutiques, with the Dior Casablanca label, for example. I found in our archives this map with all the partnerships he had forged all over the planet. Obviously, we no longer go to countries to sell our patronage, but our collaborations are based on the know-how that we identify and manage to integrate into the story that we want to tell. »
“Embroidery is a tradition that is intimately linked to the work of women. I realized this when I realized that nobody celebrates it as an art in its own right because it is equated with a domestic task. But it’s more than that! » Maria Grazia Chiuri
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