COUTURE Diplomacy

Designer MARIA GRAZIA CHIURI hasn't just TRANSFÖRMED DIOR in her SIX YEARS at the French house. She has swung open its doors to CELEBRATE ARTISTS and ARTISANS all over the world and, perhaps most important, the WOMEN who WEAR her CLOTHES.

- RACHEL TASHJIAN

Last March, shortly after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Kyiv-based artist Olesia Trofymenko received a message from a curator friend of hers, Solomia Savchuk. Dior, the bastion of French couture and ready-to-wear for 75 years, which has been under the creative direction of the Italian designer Maria Grazia Chiuri since 2016, wanted to commission Trofymenko to make a large-scale artwork for the Fall 2022 couture show in July. It was a little bit unreal,” Trofymenko tells me, because it was the first month of war and a really hard time and hard, painful news. So it was like a message from another reality.”

Chiuri knew it was a long shot. I believed it was just a little bit impossible,” she recalls. But she badly wanted Trofymenko involved in the show. I was worried that we might forget what has happened,” Chiurt says. Because all these images that we see every day, the risk is that we believe that is normal.”

After several starts and stops, Trofymenko landed on a hopeful image: a series of embroidered paintings of the Tree of Life.

It’s a symbol that is part of Ukrainian culture, but it is also a part of the culture around the world, of different religions,” says Chiuri. She sees putting art together with the craftsmanship of couture as a way to connect distinct but overlapping cultural aesthetics and traditions. I think in fashion, this] is a moment that’s] really difficult and complex, because the world is changing so much and everybody has closed themselves in their comfort zone,” she explains. But fashion and art and creativity are a way to build a bridge.”