Dior Resort 2022
For a French brand, Dior’s Resort 2022 collection has a strikingly non-French look. Hosted in the entirely marble Panathenaic Stadium, known as the birthplace of sports, the show with its athletic and Grecian influences, was certainly well placed.
“I decided to show here because I’m interested in clothes as a way of giving freedom of movement,” creative director Maria Grazia Chiuri explained to Vogue. The collection is clearly meant for movement, reflecting the more comfortable, less ornamented designs which have ‘new normal’ of many brands. Through the collection, Chiuri has clearly experimented with The New Look, which the brand is so well known for. The famous Bar Jacket, an icon for the label, was reworked without a lining into something sportier.
The designs were, however slightly familiar, just not in a Dior way. The use of fabrics and presence of and plastic buckles and drawstrings was strikingly Prada, evoking the industrial look of both their Spring 2021 and Resort 2022 collections. There were more typical Dior designs in the shape of the soft, sweeping, more traditionally Grecian dresses which came later in the show. But even these were unsafe from Chiuri’s focused study of sportswear– being styled with white trainers.
It was not just sports which tied the show to its location. Chirui painstakingly worked to make sure that Greece felt represented in the collection. “Everybody thinks of Greece and Italy in terms of holidays,” she later said, “but our research was really big in terms of the history of Greece. We worked to show how important this time was, not least for the 20th century.”
Being big in Greece might just be an understatement. Chiuri travelled extensively looking for authentic approaches to tailoring and design and a plethora of local artisans were invited to work on the collection. A soufli-based factory Silk Like used a jacquard loom to create silk leggings and shorts with the signature Dior houndstooth, Atelier Tsalavoutas gave a Dior twist to traditional fishermen caps, and tailor Aristeidis Tzonevraki used embroidery methods on the Bar Jacket.
Resort 2022 is a collection with many references, whether intentional or not. Like so many other collections which we are currently seeing, it is a reflection of the strange times in which we are living. While some labels are championing comfort, and others are celebrating the return to normality, Dior is offering a strange mid-ground with its celebration of movement. Activity is at the very heart of it, echoing the freedom which we all craved, and are having to get used to again.
You can view the full collection here.
