Dior’s Spectacular Tribute to The West

Go West young woman! Maria Grazia Chiuri headed to Upper Las Virgenes Canyon Open Space Preserve in Calabasas, California, to stage a spectacular tribute to the West. The remote mountaintop location played host to 800 guests, who were seated in tents surrounded by fire pits and air balloons. According to VogueRunway, the location was picked before Chiuri’s arrival at the house, but she found plenty of inspiration in the archives thanks to Monsieur Dior’s 1951 Lascaux collection. That collection was inspired by the Lascaux Cave in the southwest of France, where some of the most extraordinarily preserved cave drawings, dating back to 17,000 BP, were discovered in 1940.

Some of the cave paintings were worked onto silk and raffia jacquard skirts and ponchos, furs, cotton dresses, and hats. The latter were created by Stephen Jones and were inspired by Chiuri’s visit to the Brooklyn Museum’s Georgia O’Keeffe exhibit. The black pieces like a fringed dress worn over a white shirt on Adwoa Aboah or the belted midi-length coats also honored the artist’s personal style. O’Keeffe, of course, was a Western woman herself having grown up in a farmhouse in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin. She would eventually lay roots in New Mexico where she painted some of her famous landscapes.

There were prairie dresses, plaids, silks trimmed in country style lace, cozy Western knits, and denim, which was a continuation of the introduction of  America’s most treasured material that Chiuri first trail-blazed at Dior on the Fall 2017 runway. O Pioneers! Chiuri’s Dior women, like herself, are forward marching with a reverence for the past. Chiuri, as we know, is capable of creating some pretty magical runway moments and this collection struck gold.