The choreographer Sharon Eyal and Maria Grazia Chiuri, Dior’s artistic director of womenswear, use their work to speak of power, in a corporeal sense. Chiuri has brought Eyal into the Dior fold three times – first, for her Spring/Summer 2019 collection, when Eyal’s dancers crisscrossed the catwalk in tattoo-printed body stockings. The pair collaborated again for Dior’s Cruise 2021 show, held in July last year. In the southern-Italian town of Lecce in Puglia, a local dance group performed Eyal’s version of the tarantella – a folk dance traditionally said to exorcise the effects of a bite from a poisonous spider. The hypnotic and robustly physical dance shared the stage with traditional dresses created using handmade Italian tombolo lace, some covered in hand-embroidered flowers and butterflies – favoured motifs of Chiuri. And now the two women have worked together again: for Dior’s Autumn/Winter 2021 show, held in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. Eyal’s dancers operate as a form of a darker subconscious to Chiuri’s clothes, clothes that straddle comfort and romance; their collaboration embodies the connection, and sometimes discord, between body and mind – between fantasy and reality.
Chiuri, a Roman, is the first female artistic director in Dior’s 74-year history. Having started out alongside design partner Pierpaolo Piccioli at Fendi in 1989, subsequently working with him at Valentino for 17 years (and sharing the mantle of creative director there for eight), Chiuri has forged
