Christian Dior Fall 2023 Fashion Show Atmosphere

Valkyrie Miss Dior

A set design created especially for Dior by Joana Vasconcelos

For Maria Grazia Chiuri, the decor for the presentation of the Dior autumn-winter 2023-2024 ready-to- wear collection plays a fundamental role in highlighting her inspiration. For this unique show, she asked the Portuguese artist Joana Vasconcelos, born in Paris in 1971, to occupy the venue with one of her monumental installations – entitled Valkyrie Miss Dior –, a proliferation of organic forms interacting with the architecture. The techniques habitually explored by this artist – sewing, knitting, crochet –, typically associated with the feminine realm of artisanal savoir-faire, contrast with the giant and visual character of her work specially conceived for Dior.

Joana Vasconcelos has participated in major international exhibitions – such as the 2005 Venice Biennale where her socially engaged installation (The Bride) was presented. In 2018 she was honored with a solo retrospective at the Bilbao Guggenheim. She was also the first woman artist to be exhibited at the Château de Versailles, in 2012.

Maria Grazia Chiuri wished to create a dialogue with her about Catherine Dior, Monsieur Dior’s sister, a strong, independent female figure, a member of the French Resistance, who devoted much of her life to the florist trade. In her collections, the Creative Director often pays homage to Catherine, a veritable model of female emancipation.

For Joana Vasconcelos – who is interested in the personal and collective stories of women whose lives set examples – Catherine Dior is a Valkyrie. In Norse mythology, the Valkyries are deities who serve the god Odin. Touched by the role of these powerful, brave, and combative women, the Portuguese artist is developing a project celebrating creative freedom.

Her monumental work dreamed up for this Dior event occupies the space in an almost tentacular manner. Its free form, organic, from which it feels impossible to escape, is composed of fabric, lace, embroidery and crochet compositions, including “islands,” where the audience is invited to sit.

Textile traditions preserve, in the future, the recollection of their past, they possess a pervasive intelligence. Joana Vasconcelos usually works with fabrics that evoke a memory of origins and the strength of artisanship for her. For the Dior défilé, she chose to use floral mottled fabrics inspired by the House’s archives, a tribute to Miss Dior’s flowers and to the splendor of nature so dear to the founding-couturier, thus connecting places, times and cultures. Joana Vasconcelos reactivates, through emotions, the intrinsic beauty and the constantly renewed interweaving of femininity and feminism that punctuates her work as it does that of Maria Grazia Chiuri.