Season after season, Dior women’s collections designed by Maria Grazia Chiuri highlight the connections between savoir-faire in different cultures. The symbolic credo “Dior around the world” coincided with Monsieur Dior’s project to design fashion that was open to the world and could traverse continents. That same vision guides the Creative Director in her quest to explore the links between places and technical knowledge. For the Dior Cruise 2023 show, Spain offered a new site in this enchanted itinerary, bridging spaces and communities through the combined prism of couture and creation. With his autumn-winter 1948 collection, Monsieur Dior expressed his fascination for the country by dreaming up a dress he named Pampelune. Many others would follow, infused with the memory of places he had visited – such as Andorre, Madrid and Barcelone – or celebrating an exceptional festive and religious heritage, with Pâques à Séville, Fête à Grenade and Bal à Séville.

Exploring the notion of “divine femininity” is fundamental to Maria Grazia Chiuri’s work. Each collection is an occasion to explore how each era, country or culture has appropriated that representation. From the goddesses of Antiquity to seventeenth-century Baroque sculptures by Luisa Roldán, also known as La Roldana – a little-known figure in Sevillian art – by way of powerful and diverse demonstrations of femininity by Pedro Almodóvar, the Dior Cruise 2023 show displayed a pluralistic idea of Spanish women. Incarnations of the cult of the Virgin Mary, like the Madonna Macarena, linked seventeenth-century religious fervour to more recent Pop culture phenomena.