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Athens’ 2,000-year-old Panathenaic Stadium was able to seat 70,000 marble seats for the first modern Olympics in 1896. So there’s plenty of front row space at this week’s venue’s Diors catwalk show, where the guest list is capped at 400.
While most international buyers, editors, and clients watch from home on their laptops, the Diors Cruise collection is a great live event. The brand wanted to show that ancient stadiums were made for a responsible choice of venue, well ventilated and spacious. It’s also undeniably regal, especially when lit up by fireworks and accompanied by a full orchestra. Most of the Greek and Italian audience were joined by the president of Greece, Katerina Sakellaropoulou, and actor Anya Taylor-Joy.
Catwalk shows remain the most powerful fashion lever to generate attention and prestige. For luxury brands who are watching profits dwindle and watching with envy, as cult leggings label Lululemon announced 88% revenue growth in the first quarter of this year there is a strong business case for keeping the catwalks alive.
But there’s more at stake here than the advantages of luxury brands and designer egos. The catwalk show is a symbol of fashion’s identity as a creative art as well as a business. They give voice mode in a wider conversation. It is in this spirit that Kerby Jean-Raymond, the first black American designer to appear in Parisian haute couture, will next month livestream her Pyer Moss catwalk show from Villa Lewaro, the elegant Hudson River area built by Madam CJ Walker, African-American. America. entrepreneur who was America’s first self-made female millionaire.
Now designers are pulling out all the stops to captivate the hearts and minds of trainers and belts and back to dress up. The spectacular Diors Athens is just one in a line of upcoming fashion blockbusters. Earlier this week, Louis Vuitton staged and filmed a space tourism-themed catwalk show outside Paris, without live audiences. Max Mara takes their catwalk to the Italian island of Ischia next week, while Valentino and Saint Laurent have announced a catwalk show in Venice in July.
For Dior designer Maria Grazia Chiuri, every catwalk collection is a huge space for research and imagination. For creative people, this is a wonderful thing to do, an opportunity to collaborate.
Chiuri uses the Athena show to explore how the relationship between the prestigious Paris fashion house and the global culture and traditions that have emerged as references on her catwalks have developed. In 1951, a famous set of images by photographer Jean-Pierre Pedrazzini showed models in Christian Dior ball gowns posing in front of statues of female Caryatids from the Acropolis, reflecting their graceful poses. Seventy years later, Chiuri realizes that a French fashion house that uses ancient Greek monuments as stage props for its latest silhouettes isn’t going to fly with modern sensibilities.
As a designer, if you are careless, then beauty and culture will be reduced so that it becomes a cliché, he said. That’s what we’re avoiding, we’re very focused on what’s contemporary in Greece right now. The collection shown on the catwalk will provide work for the Greek fashion business, with houndstooth pieces woven at Silk Line, an East Macedonian factory using traditional Greek jacquard techniques. The Greek fishing hats on the catwalk were made by Atelier Tsalavoutas, who has been producing them since the 19th century. In a statement, the Dior house stressed their respect for the iconic place, where they worked closely with Greek archaeologists to ensure the site is complete and its preservation is unconditional.
Travel is a fantasy for most people today, but billionaires have had a very different pandemic experience. On July 20, the inaugural 11-minute flight of Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin rocket staff will inaugurate the era of space tourism. If successful, 1% will soon need a new holiday wardrobe.
So for Louis Vuitton’s latest catwalk show, the creative director of the house, lifelong space travel buff Nicolas Ghesquire, created a new season of capsule wardrobe: the space capsule wardrobe. Images of escalators pointing to a planet, surfers on a moon-viewed beach, and motel car parks in alien landscapes are plastered on trousers lined with spacesuits, futuristic Courrges-style flat boots, and gravity-defying ovoid silhouettes. It’s a fantasy that has come true, now that it has turned into a competition between giants, Ghesquire said in a video call after a livestream of the show, which was filmed without a physical audience. The designer wants to travel alone. (But not the first flight. I wasn’t that brave.)
The allure of space has always been a metaphor for adventure. This show is about millions of people longing for a few days at the beach, like about what to pack for a Blue Origin flight. Think silk parachute evening gowns, chunky flat sandals, and mini suitcases made into handbags. The show was filmed at Ax Majeur, an art installation on the edge of Paris set in a futuristic architectural landscape garden. With its grand scale, modernist colors, and airy urban minimalism, this venue shares the same aesthetic as previous Louis Vuitton show locations such as the Miho Museum in Japan, and the Niteri Museum in Brazil. We all miss the places we can’t go, but sometimes exoticism isn’t so far away, says Ghesquire.
The beautiful catwalk show is a celebration that brings fashion the visibility it deserves, he added. She hopes to return to the catwalk with an audience in October. But I also want to be a change agent now. Ghesquire intends to maintain the spirit of 2020 in reducing fabric orders, reducing prototypes, not over-producing collections. It’s about the small decisions we make every day and being careful to keep us going in the right direction, rather than always thinking about expansion.
Lockdown dress codes made themselves felt on the Dior catwalk in bold white trainers and logoed sweatshirts worn with a liquid white goddess gown. After the pandemic, everyone wants to feel able to move, says Chiuri.
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