Review of Dior Spring 2022 Ad Campaign by Creative Director Fabien Baron and Photographer Brigitte Niedermair with models Maryel Uchida, Naomi Ekindi, Sculy Mejia, and Steinberg
Dior dances into the future with a new campaign for Spring 2022. With creative direction by Fabien Baron and photography by Brigitte Niedermair, the campaign couples inventive choreography with a simple and bold visual language to express the bold power of the house’s recent aesthetic pivot.
The house’s Spring 2022 collection formed a dynamic inflection point for creative director Maria Grazia Chiuri, who closed a chapter of exploring fairy-tale femininity and began a new one that mined Dior’s underappreciated 60’s era, opting for club-ready mod looks with clean lines and vibrant colors. The creative director’s commitment to feminist expression remains present, however, with an important reference to that era’s sense of liberation in mind, as well as in the collection and show staging featuring artwork by Anna Paparatti, one of the few women artists recognized in Rome during the 60’s.
The new campaign from Baron – who has been creating blockbuster campaigns alongside Chiuri for many seasons – reflects this shift, combining a slick and more minimal aesthetic with technology and dance choreography to reflect the collection’s sense of energy and progressivism. Moving in angular unity, dancers clad in nude leotards strut across a screen with flashing horizontal lights that float in a black void. It’s hard to tell what’s a physical set and what is edited in post-production, making for a psychedelic and fantastical merging of analogue and digital.
Meanwhile, footage of models wearing the new collection is seamlessly woven through the awesome dance cinematography. Projections and lasers dance across their faces as they pose in the simple, sinuous silhouettes and pop-art colors of the collection. Daft Punk’s evergreen dance hit “Around the World” provides the perfect score, an uplifting balance of the familiar and the futuristic.
Niedermair’s accompanying photographs create a similar sense of angular, colorful immersion, as if the character of the designs has expanded into space itself. The collection’s stripes stretch back into infinity, with abstract geometry subtly subverting its lines and motifs. All the while, the models – familiar faces like Steinberg and Maryel Uchida from seasons and runway shows past – are cast as bewitching champions of this bold and modern sensibility.
With entrancing visuals and a subtle message of the importance of playfulness in constructing the self, Dior’s aesthetic pivot, with this excellent campaign as its manifesto, is coming at just the right time: as the world experiences a collective renewal and an urge to dance, Dior shares a simple yet endless visual language through which to express this feeling.
Dior Creative Director | Maria Grazia Chiuri
Agency | Baron & Baron
Creative Director | Fabien Baron
Photographer | Brigitte Niedermair
Models | Maryel Uchida, Naomi Ekindi, Sculy Mejia, & Steinberg
Stylist | Elin Svahn
Hair | Olivier Schawalder
Makeup | Peter Philips