Dior dazzles with Josephine Baker-inspired haute couture show in Paris

PARIS, Jan 23 (Reuters) – This Jan. 23 story has been refiled to appropriate the spelling of ‘jacquards’ within the first paragraph

Dior designer Maria Grazia Chiuri paid homage to Josephine Baker together with her spring high fashion present on Monday, sending out a blinding lineup that includes golden jacquards, crushed velvet and beaded fringes that swayed and sparkled down the runway.

“She instantly understood the facility of trend,” Chiuri mentioned of Baker, the famed French-American jazz singer and dancer.

The designer regarded past Baker’s stage fashion, additionally contemplating her love of fits and the uniforms she wore as a member of the resistance in France throughout the Second World Warfare, in addition to extra intimate clothes, together with body-enveloping robes worn after a efficiency.

The present of the LVMH-owned (LVMH.PA) label opened with an opulent robe-like coat, thrown over a satin bodysuit. A black velvet jumpsuit adopted, strapless, the legs minimize large, earlier than shifting right into a sequence of enveloping coats worn on prime of lengthy, pleated skirts.

Paintings by Mickalene Thomas lined the set, larger-than-life portraits of Black ladies, together with Donyale Luna, Eartha Kitt, and Naomi Sims who constructed on the trail opened up by Baker, mentioned Thomas.

She sought to depict the wonder and confidence of those ladies, Thomas instructed Reuters, describing the problem of whittling the checklist all the way down to 13.

“All of those ladies had been socially lively and both they used their stage, their voice or their efficiency to actually inform a narrative or a story about their private life and about additionally the demographic that they had been from,” mentioned Thomas.

The exhibit, which is about up in a brief present house on the Rodin Museum in Paris is open to the general public via January 29.

Reporting by Mimosa Spencer; Enhancing by Vin Shahrestani

: .