Paris Fashion Week is typically a very high visibility event which showcases clothes the 99 Percent population at large will never be able to afford and features front rows filled with celebrities and world royalty. But this year, the world is different.
In our brave new world, filled with visionary people who are helping us through the crisis with their genius and inventiveness, Maria Grazia Chiuri at Dior drew her inspiration from World War II Europe and went miniature. She created her entire collection on small, doll-sized mannequins which will be carried to couture buyers around the world in a self-contained trunk. No waste of extra cloth, which is where the idea originated from in 1945 when French designers created the “Théâtre de la Mode”. No grand spectacle runway show that will only last fifteen minutes and never be watched again. This time, with Italian filmmaker Matteo Garrone at the helm, Dior went cinematic. And what an incredible, magical world of possibilities they — Chiuri and Garrone, two of my favorite Italians — created.
A coat from the Fall 2020 Dior Couture collection, photo by Brigitte Niedermair
While I watched the short film, I couldn’t help but repeat my mantra, what I say to myself when I watch Garrone’s films. “There’s no filmmaker like him, there’s no filmmaker like him….” with the same wonder and awe, and in the same tone as Dorothy in ‘The Wizard of Oz’.
Garrone creates dreams, or sometimes nightmares, but his work is never earthly — bogged down by the everyday. It points to the most beautifully perfect, or the ugliest aspect of human nature, with poetry and a innate sense of cinema. We want to see a Greek statue dressed in a Dior goddess gown. We wish to come upon a couple of human trees intertwined, branches as their hair and a Fortuny pleated dress in a midnight green shade. There is delight in the closing long black evening coat from the collection worn so casually, the nymph wading through the ponds of the idyllic set.
When I interviewed Garrone in Cannes a couple of years ago he admitted that for him, “it’s difficult to be optimistic in this world but I believe there is a small part that is really positive. I find it difficult to be optimistic about the entire world but that doesn’t mean I’m a nihilist about everybody. I believe that there are people who are very virtuous and small parts in the world where things seem to work in a way.” Obviously in Chiuri he found one such person.
Fashion is reinventing itself and cinema needs a boost to move forward. At the moment, those who can see how the two are deeply connected, style and the Seventh Art, will be those who will figure out the next stages for both the film and fashion industries. And mark my words, both Garrone and Chiuri will be among those ruling these fields.
See what I mean? Dreamy eh…