Reflection on the film “The making of Dior Fall 2023 in India”
The film shows us an inside of the story of the Fall 2023 Collection of Dior by Maria Grazia Chiuri - creative director of Dior. She has been fascinated by Indian culture and fashion for many many years. Maria mentions that the collection has been inspired by many signifactnt woman - one of them being her close friend Karishma. With whom together she has been collaborating for years trying to grasp the love and appreciation they both have for India’s traditional crafts. They both have been closely working with Chankaya School of Crafts. They focus on cherishing and preserving traditional artisan crafts. We can observe the students learn the complicated and intricate processes of creating these fabrics and embroideries for the Dior collection . Thanks to projects like this the craft can live on. Instead of focusing on mass production and making profit - the main objective is to preserve the cultural heritage of textile making, embroidery, dyeing, weaving - putting care into the process and the people producing it, using traditional techniques, celebrating the uniqueness and mastery of India’s craftsmanship.
Since colonial times, due to British occupation - India’s traditional crafts have been slowly abandoned or extremely exploited. The focus shifted from quality, craftsmanship and tradition to mass production and cutting cost as much as possible to satisfy European elites. Besides all of the obvious consequences colonial trade had on the country, one of the results was also “extinction” of some traditional fabrics e.x. Dhaka Muslin. Once very famous and exclusive woven fabric know for its very high thread count (1200) and light sheer texture. Reserved for the European royalties as its price was around 26 times higher than silk’s. Since this special fabric could only be made with special strain of cotton - the production costs grew too high for the expectations of the manufacturers who wanted to turn this artisanal fruit of craftsmanship into a popular industrial product. Today it’s almost impossible to find the original fabric, yet some people have been putting great efforts into recreating and reviving this historical technique.
I think the way Maria Grazia approaches the topic of cultural appreciation could be an example for a lot of brands today. She researches the history, travels to the specific destinations the crafts come from, manufactures the fabric through local artisan craftsman - instead of only focusing of the aesthetics of the culture and copying them into the collections without wider knowledge about their history and meaning. She cares to give credit and honour to the the people of the culture she sources her inspiration from, opposite to many designers who focus on just the surface level aesthetics and cutting the costs - by that loosing the “integrity” and “significance” of the fabric. Practices like this can really help to bring fashion back to a slower pace, focus on quality and artisanal craft, and get away from the extremely damaging overproduction/consumption - especially when they come from major fashion houses like Dior. Of course all this not say that Dior or Maria Grazia are the new faces of slow fashion, but this is a small step towards bettering and educating the fashion industry one collection at time.
