Dior to Show 7 Decades of its Own History

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To celebrate Dior’s 70th anniversary, the fashion house has teamed up with Les Arts Décoratifs in Paris to stage the largest-ever fashion exhibition the city has ever seen. Titled Christian Dior, Couturier du Rêve, the show is slated to open in tandem with Couture Week on July 5th and will run through until early January of next year. It will span 32,000 square-feet of gallery space in total and include approximately 300 dresses sourced from every era of Dior, from the house’s founding year in 1947 through to Maria Grazia Chiuri’s current reign in 2017. Exhibition designer, Nathalie Crinière has been tasked with staging the epic show.

The exhibition space itself promises to be as extravagant as the clothing on show. A massive 50-foot tall gallery mimicking Versailles’s Hall of Mirrors is being custom-built to display Dior gowns worn by royals and pseudo-royal celebrities throughout history. Crinière has also recreated an art gallery, boudoir, street, and garden inside of Les Arts Décoratifs to compliment the different aesthetic themes of Dior. In the galleries, viewers will also be able to see hundreds of bags, shoes, accessories, jewelry, and perfume bottles. The hope is that these additional elements will allow visitors to fully understand the evolution of Dior over its seven-decade history.

Christian Dior himself owned an art gallery before opening his fashion house and had a particular passion for collecting Art Nouveau objects, as well as furniture. In homage to this, gowns in the exhibition will be paired with a selection of paintings, sculptures, and objets d’art that compliment the clothes and illuminate the designer’s inspirations.

Christian Dior, Couturier du Rêve is a massive undertaking. In all, there will be thousands of objects on show, most of which the curators have had to borrow on loan from other institutions. Yet for those involved in its production, it will all have been well worth it. A fashion exhibition of this size has never been staged in Paris before and will be sure to go down in the city’s fashion history.

To contextualize just how huge the exhibition is, it’s worth noting that Paris’s last Dior retrospective was staged in 1987. Its scope was much more narrow; it only covered the ten years between the house’s founding and Christian Dior’s death. Before that, Dior himself staged a show using the same galleries at Les Arts Décoratifs to display a collection of 18th century French furniture in 1955.

Christian Dior, Couturier du Rêve will open at Les Arts Décoratifs in Paris on July 5th, 2017.

Scroll through for a first look at some of the iconic pieces included in the exhibition.

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