BLUE: “Among all the colors, navy blue is the only one which can ever compete with black, it has all the same qualities,” wrote Christian Dior in The Little Dictionary of Fashion.

For the Christian Dior Fall 2017 collection, Maria Grazia Chiuri reactivates the different codes of the House’s heritage with transgression, without fetishism or nostalgia as she explores a color that was among Monsieur Dior’s great favorites. Blue is the color of twentieth-century painting, having brought depth and emotion to the work of artists such as Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, Paul Cézanne and Marc Chagall.

The collection is a sequence of pieces that reconnect emotions, feelings and memories. Inspired by the ample hood, borrowed from the tunics of pastors, Maria Grazia Chiuri reinterprets the idea of the Chevrierlook from the Haute Couture Autumn-Winter 1949 collection in a series of jackets, skirts, dresses, capes, coats and small bomber jackets, revisiting the extravagance of the original hood through a more contemporary and sporty attitude, and the transgressive use of materials: taffeta, velvet, herringbone motifs, knit. Blue, the color symbol of power, beauty and spirituality, is employed for genderless outfits and to express differences. It is positioned between nature and culture, as the color of the spirit, of contact with the infinite, in us and beyond. It initiates a link to the mystery of the moon, the comets and planets that explode on evening dresses of opulent velvet or on dégradé tulle that blends into the blue-gray of embroidered lily flowers. Blue fascinates through its emotional resonance, but also its social quality. It encapsulates a real cross-section in terms of gender, age and social class.

On the flipside of being the symbol of holy virgins and kings, blue is also the color of workwear. Blue in loose pants, blouses and washed shirts, which give a new identity to the House’s color story.

Maria Grazia Chiuri has immersed herself in the complexity of this color, with the complicity of blues music and its great interpreters, such as Nina Simone and her Blue Prelude, a nod to the femininity of a color that unites the ocean depths with the infinity of the celestial vault.