At SCAD FASH Museum’s Dior Couture Show, Class Is in Session

The house of Dior is no stranger to a museum show. Over the years, the Brooklyn Museum, V&A in London, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and many more have showcased the artistry of the French fashion brand, with exquisite couture garments also traveling to Paris and Seoul, then back again. Evolving the narrative of a Dior exhibition, or presenting something that a globe-trotting fan hasn’t already experienced in Dallas, Riyadh, or Australia, becomes a hurdle. But Dior: Crafting Fashion, on view now at the SCAD FASH Museum of Fashion + Film in Atlanta, Georgia, handles the task with ease. Using the university environment as a guide, the latest in a long line of unforgettable Dior expositions manages to find a fresh perspective.

Hélène Starkman, the exhibition curator for Christian Dior Couture and the curator of Crafting Fashion, calls the new show “Dior 101.” This is the first time the brand’s gotten the opportunity to showcase within a college setting. “Students are at the heart of this exhibition,” she tells W. While Crafting Fashion is for any style buff lucky enough to find themselves in the Atlanta area, it’s the Savannah College of Art and Design students who drove Starkman’s curatorial decisions.

“Students need to understand that, to be creative, you have to have your own internal mood board,” she adds. “Sometimes, when you’re young, you think creation will come from within.” With Crafting Fashion, Starkman shows these students the need for artists to explore outside their chosen creative bubble.

Crafting Fashion begins with a breakdown of Dior’s eight creative directors, from founder Christian Dior himself to the recently appointed Jonathan Anderson. The first display features just eight garments, one couture look from each director. Each piece was inspired by something outside the world of fashion. A red velvet suit by Dior acts as an homage to Monsieur Dior’s close friendship with artist and illustrator Christian Bérard. A simple black dress with a structured, pleated skirt by Yves Saint Laurent references French New Wave cinema, and a splattered Marc Bohan creation brings to mind the work of Jackson Pollock.

“It’s important to show students that all these designers are museum-goers and theater-goers,” Starkman says. Anyone who is a fan of Anderson’s knows he is continuing that legacy; he championed the Loewe Craft Prize during his time with the Spanish brand, and his first few collections with Dior have proven he is bringing his love of ceramics and classic books to the new gig. A dress from Anderson’s first Dior couture collection—which concludes the opening gallery—was directly inspired by Kenya-born artist Magdalene Odundo, in all its onyx and shapely glory.

The first room represented the kernel of an idea—next comes the process, conveyed through the second gallery, where dreamy designs are boiled down to their most elementary parts. It’s not often one visits a couture exhibition and is faced with mannequins dressed in muslin, but that peek into the process allows Crafting Fashion to stand out from its predecessors. The pieces of fabric stand next to their finished counterparts, scribbled upon and pinned with embellishment prototypes. It’s a reminder (for students, but those with degrees as well) that high fashion does not bloom overnight.

Crafting Fashion isn’t the first exhibition Dior and SCAD have done together. Last year, the fashion house and university worked on Christian Dior: Jardins Rêvés at the school’s Lacoste campus in France. Those unable to make it to Provence, however, can now step into Crafting Fashion’s third gallery, where the focus is on the garden—a major theme for Christian Dior, the son of a fertilizer manufacturer. Dior often looked to florals for inspiration, and his successors frequently returned to the botanical world as well.

Dior fans will recognize many of the garments in this section, like the herbarium dresses from Maria Grazia Chiuri’s first couture collection. An orange floral dress with a strapless bodice and voluminous bubble skirt, meanwhile, is a rarer find. Known as the Mexico dress and created by Saint Laurent, the piece was only recently acquired by Dior and is displayed in Atlanta for the first time.

Also making its museum debut is an orange skirt-and-jacket set, which actor Olivia de Havilland wore to the Atlanta “re-premiere” of Gone With the Wind in 1961. In the final room of the exhibition—the largest one—Georgia history comes into play once again with the inclusion of a Chiuri-designed bar suit homage: Georgia-born actor Elle Fanning wore the look to the Cannes Film Festival in 2019. This last area is dedicated to celebrity dressing, where everyone from Marilyn Monroe to Rihanna is represented in the form of jaw-dropping Dior gowns.

Documents decorate the galleries, providing context, sketches, and a behind-the-scenes for nearly every garment. There is much more paperwork in Crafting Fashion than one will find in other Dior exhibitions (but don’t worry, you won’t be tested on the matieral.) With these inclusions, Starkman hopes to show SCAD students that “designer” isn’t the only job in fashion.

“You can work in the atelier and actually sew the garments,” she says. “You can create accessories, bags, or hats. You can work on the perfume, the makeup, the fashion shows.” Or, you can design exhibitions, and if Crafting Fashion were a SCAD assignment, Starkman would receive an A+.