Maria Grazia Chiuri paid tribute to the sacred and timeless place that is the atelier for the Christian Dior Fall 2018 Haute Couture collection following the exhibition “Christian Dior: Designer of Dreams”, at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs.

The ateliers are temples, guardians of thought and ideas. It is at the heart of this notion of couture – with its series of images, shapes, colors and moods – that the creative vision of Maria Grazia Chiuri unfolds. Couture is an example of the avant-garde, an art form that develops through imagination. A reflection that cultivates the boldness to repeating codified gestures while seeking to challenge and overturn them. Because couture today is, above all, a conceptual gesture.

Maria Grazia Chiuri returns to the fundamentals and designs suits in which the Bar jacket develops batwing sleeves. The real transgression lies in referring to the rules for use while twisting their syntax.

The powdery palette (brick, green, pink and orange), interacting with nude, colors the clothes but also the accessories – refined costume jewelry, veil and hats – in a complementary continuity of the body on which couture places the emphasis. Evening dresses, rendered dazzling by their mix of pleating and layering, contrast with simple bustiers which offer a surprising dissonance. The sculptural form of a red silk dress sewn from a single piece of fabric opens the way to a series of majestic and intimate creations, both restrained and explosive: couture, in the process, becoming a psychological place of female resistance.

Alison Bancroft, in a Lacanian sense, equates couture with the mode of expression of the avant-garde movements: reappropriation of secular practices rejected in a desire for newness and reinterpretation of traditions through contemporary values. It is through this encounter between a system of established rules and the freest creativity that, for Maria Grazia Chiuri, couture becomes akin to rebellion: a kind of ideological “guerrilla” that explodes on the frontiers of entrenched tradition, without ever overstepping them.

Katie Holmes, Emma Roberts, Karlie Kloss and Chiara Ferragni are among the guests who share their first impressions of the show décor and the haute couture collection which took to the runway Monday in the gardens of the Musée Rodin.