Dior shines at Paris Fashion Week with a lush, colorful runway

Kayo Delkoli
Sao Paulo-SP

Joana Vasconcelos stormed the Dior show during Paris Fashion Week with a gorgeous catwalk installation. The Portuguese plastic artist dominated the space with over a ton of colorful fabrics in a variety of textures, all from Dior’s own collection, spread across the ceiling and runway.

The models, who presented the autumn-winter looks of this and next year, walked in a zigzag pattern under prints, sparkles and lights. The collection collided with the artist’s work. By the signature of Maria Grazia Chiuri, the brief, serious and, of course, extremely elegant clothes took almost a secondary role in the show.

The designer offered a visual feast of coats and skirts in neutral tones inspired by the legendary black actress and dancer Josephine Baker, an icon of the Jazz Age, the wild 1920s and the civil rights movement forty years later.

Chiuri continued its tradition of dialogue with other art forms by having African-American artist Michaelen Thomas, one of the hottest names in contemporary painting and collage, as the year’s special guest. Thomas’ work itself provides an overview of figures in black and queer culture. Dior clothing this year brought black women as the main characters.

Speaking of luxury, Rick Owens of the eponymous brand brought his own with an oversized jacket covered in hand-embroidered silk chiffon hems and sequins, the sewing process taking six hours, and the shoulders forming an upward curve.

Exaggerated measurements were another notable element of Owens’ fashion show, which also featured an aggressive, black look made up of high heels and shoulder straps with sharp angles.

Several slender, androgynous-looking models covered in artificial fog wore black lenses over their eyes, as if these women were gothic horror figures appearing on the runway. Estonian rapper Tommy Cash, the muse for Owens’ sinister aesthetic ambitions, attended the show wearing a tight white T-shirt with “suue me” printed across the chest and nothing but a prosthetic vagina from the waist down.

“He doesn’t lose focus,” said rapper Usher. “Her clothes are the kind of clothes you’ll have in your wardrobe forever.”

One statement made at this year’s Paris Fashion Week is that luxury and beauty don’t have to go hand in hand. The camouflaged models wore huge red false eyelashes, beanies with horns on the sides and angular jackets.

Off White, for its part, put a model on the catwalk wearing a mechanical looking head, made of interlocking gears, with only eyes and a mouth on display. This is one of the latest examples of adventures from Off White, an eccentric brand that features the iconography of steampunk, a science fiction subgenre that combines retro and futuristic industrial technology.

Unsurprisingly, actor Jared Leto, himself a style mannequin for the series, was in the front row watching the parade, covered in a white leather coat, contrasting gloves and black sunglasses. It is worth remembering that Leto will play Karl Lagerfeld, the legendary designer of Chanel for four decades, in the biopic.

Still on the leotard theme, statuesque Naomi Campbell walked for Off White, but wearing the brand’s most demure outfit, such as a body-hugging black dress with a collar that formed a perfect circle around the model’s head.

Campbell’s presence is a nod to Virgil Abloh, the Off White designer with whom he was friends. Abloh died in 2021, at the age of 41, from cancer. The only takeaway from the Off White show is that its new creative director, Ib Kamara, made his debut.

Let’s quickly go back to Jared Leto. The actor attended the first fashion show of the Vivienne Westwood brand, whose eponymous founder died in December 2022. The position was taken over by the designer’s widow, Andreas Kronthaler, who evoked Westwood’s timeless rebelliousness and elegance and paid tribute to him by stamping. the designer’s face in a blouse.

Rebellion also set the tone for Stella McCartney’s protest collection. Among other pieces, the designer presented coats, dresses and skirts made from grapes, mushrooms and apples, imitating animal skin. The podium was a stable. “My clothes didn’t kill anything,” he told the press.