Dior Women's Fall 2021 Ad Campaign

Review of Dior Women’s Fall 2021 Ad Campaign by Chief Creative Officer Fabien Baron of Baron & Baron, Art Director Margot Populaire, and Photographer Elizaveta Porodina with models Essoye Mombot, Sofia Steinberg, Sade van der Hoeven, and Maryel Uchida

Fabien Baron continues his mythical world-building for Dior in a new Fall 2021 Women’s campaign. Photographed by Elizaveta Porodina, the imagery explores a psychic realm of modern myth, bringing a fairy-tale spirit to a pop-art or Bauhaus-like aesthetic sense of color and geometricality.

Maria Grazia Chiuri’s design work infuses classically feminine styles from the house’s history with a contemporarily tailored strength, and executes them in colors and prints that feel rife with romance and symbolism. Coordinated silk headscarves exude a distinctly 60’s vibe – while also of course evoking Little Red.

While the runway film presentation for the collection – also directed by Baron – situated the clothing among the baroque historicality of the Château de Versailles, the campaign imagery uses a modernist and abstract space to bring it through the present day and into the future.

The setting features a heady interplay of simple geometric shapes. Interlocking angles distort our sense of depth and perspective; the circular doorway feels like both a literal path to mystery and a figurative frame of a work of art.

Porodina brings her singular and renowned sense of color to capturing her heroines in this space, saturating the atmosphere with deep reds, oranges, and sepias. The photographer was first a painter before she turned to the camera, which helps to account for her masterful sense of proportion and composition. She uses film instead of digital, handling most of the darkroom post-production herself, an approach that makes for images that feel at once vintage and futuristic.

While it was easier to identify our surroundings when we were still inside the baroque galleries of chateaus, the metaphysical architecture of this place out of space and time is a deeper expression of Chiuri’s ongoing exploration of emotional, feminist narratives that embrace both the grandiose and the personal. Brimming with color, romance, and mystery, the campaign is another beautiful chapter in Dior’s ongoing saga that is at once contemporary and timeless.