The Big Aura of Dior at Haute Couture Week Spring-Summer 2024

Imagine, as a backdrop: twenty-three oversized dresses, approximately five meters high, applied to a grid drawn by irregular black bands reminiscent of warp and weft. These monumental pieces echo the dresses of the Ottoman sultans seen by Isabella Ducrot in Istanbul. Abstraction of the dress, symbol of a power that transcends bodies.

For Maria Grazia Chiuri , Big Aura represents that aura that permeates each piece of Haute Couture — a territory of contemplative rapture where the reproduction of the original is never the same, obliged to adapt in each of its reproductions to the bodies of those who can possess it. The aura that Chiuri and Ducrot refer to in different ways reflects the uniqueness and authenticity of the work of art. She inscribes it in the collective memory.

The artistic director of the House explores this concept by revisiting the Dior myth — particularly with the La Cigale dress from the Haute Couture autumn-winter 1952 collection . The latter, in its sculptural construction and its moiré fabric, recalls the sacred. We are witnessing an iridescence of the material: gold, white, grey, burgundy, green. Its modeling in 2024 takes elements from Dior archive dresses to reconstruct contemporary silhouettes imbued with this same aura. The same goes for materials such as cotton and silk in the colour of the trench coat, which seem molded in air because of the relationship they have with the body and the environment. Some black velvet dresses enhance the look of the wearer, moving with fluidity in their step. While a sumptuous feather cape rests on a double embroidered organza dress. The embroideries are like worn fragments of found poems in which the imagination is lost. In this collection, Maria Grazia Chiuri — through the material, chromatic and constructive presence of the elements that sculpt the silhouettes — reminds us of the auratic dimension of Couture : a powerful experience, not only contemplative but also performative.