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Dior honors Josephine Baker at its Haute Couture show
Paris, Jan 23 (EFE).- The French-American dancer and singer Josephine Baker was, symbolically, the guest star at the Christian Dior Haute Couture show, which paid tribute with her collection to one of the most iconic figures in Paris from the 1920s. In a line loaded with beige and black tones, in fluid and rectilinear silhouettes of fringed, sequined, silk and velvet dresses, the firm’s creative director, Maria Grazia Chiuri, showed that the recovery of female figures continues at the center of his work at Dior. The singer of African-American origin who embodied modernity, becoming an icon of the glamor of cosmopolitan Paris in the 1920s, also slipped into the parade thanks to the hairstyles of the models, which imitated her short, gelled hair and with the curls marking the fringe. A hairstyle as iconic as her smile and her particular dresses, with which she has gone down to posterity and now she returns to set the trends of the spring-summer 2023 Haute Couture collection, within the framework of the Week of Parisian fashion. In 2021, the singer, who died in Paris in 1975, also became the first black woman to enter the Pantheon, destined to honor the great figures in French history. With this parade, Dior recalls the dreamy figure and example that Baker was, but also her energy, with dresses that were well thought out for the dance. The coats are a gown that protects whoever wears it on the way from the dressing room to the stage. Velvet dresses are a soft fabric that falls on the model and marks the neckline on the back and chest with a simple drape, and satin and embroidery become the stars of the night. Beige and black were the colors of the collection, with some gradients of gold and silver in the fringes of the fringed dresses. FLUID SILHOUETTES AND NEUTRAL COLORS The most beloved silhouettes by the firm’s founder, Christian Dior, have been revisited: the “new look” dress is now a shirt set in a kind of metallic fabric, like a mesh, with a marked fall and transparencies. The tailoring suits are also reinterpreted, this time in more masculine fabrics and with the pants cut at ankle height to expose the heels, with an impressive sole. The decoration was carried out by the African-American artist Mickalene Thomas, with whom Chiuri has already worked on the decoration of the Cruise 2020 collection, presented in Morocco. Thomas explores celebrity and femininity by questioning the prevailing canons of art history, especially through “collages” of painting and photography. Today, the ship installed by Dior in the gardens of the Rodin Museum in Paris was decorated inside with gigantic “collages” embroidered by hand by the Chanakya workshops and the Chanakya Craft School, and which reflected the photographs of women who broke barriers and prejudices racial. Among them were Baker, but also the first African-American woman to be nominated for an Oscar, Dorothy Dandridge, the singer Nina Simone, or the “top models” Naomi Sims and Donyale Luna, among others. “These women broke many barriers in the fields of television, film, fashion and social activism. Thanks to their determination and their sacrifices, I can do the work I do today and be the artist that I am,” Thomas said in a release. Among the guests at the parade were tennis player Roger Federer, actresses Kirsten Dunst and Anya Taylor-Joy and singer Jisoo. María D. Valderrama (c) EFE Agency
