| With its age-old traditions and boundless imagination, Maria Grazia Chiuri found in Mexico a “place of the spirit”. For that reason, among others, the Creative Director of Dior’s women’s collections invited Elina Chauvet, an emblematic and engaged figure in feminist art, to participate in the Dior cruise 2024 event staged in Mexico. Originally from the north of the country, and more precisely from Ciudad Juárez, tragically known for its high number of feminicides, Elina Chauvet first studied architecture while also finding herself drawn to various artistic expressions in a land that has given the world many iconic female creators, from Frida Kahlo to Tina Modotti. Born in 1959, she rose to international fame later in life, at the age of 50. Her installation Zapatos Rojos (in English, “red shoes”) is poignantly simple: a composition of hundreds of bright red shoes arranged in public spaces, on sidewalks, streets and squares. The colour is hardly insignificant. Red as blood; the red of love and life. For Elina Chauvet, Zapatos Rojos is a way of paying tribute to all the women killed on the pretext of “passion” – but, above all, it’s an intimate way of perpetuating the memory of a sister murdered by her partner. |
| In this way, Elina Chauvet gives body – and heart(s) – to these women, be they young or old, from every walk of life and all countries, by scattering scarlet shoes across a number of cities throughout Latin America, Spain and Italy. Everywhere, the visual impact of this manifesto makes an impression and stirs the conscience. Because beneath the pain, behind the sadness, lies a message of hope, of life that triumphs regardless, and of resistance. In 2012, Elina Chauvet embarked on a new odyssey: Confianza, an ode to the Italian artist Pippa Bacca, who had been brutally murdered a few years earlier. It was after seeing that deeply moving exhibition in Rome that Maria Grazia Chiuri contacted Elina Chauvet, in keeping with her desire to offer, through her collections for Dior, a showcase for feminist creation in all its forms, whether pictorial, photographic, plastic or performative. For the Dior cruise 2024 line, revealed within the magnificent patio of the Colegio de San Ildefonso, built by the Jesuits in 1588, Elina Chauvet thus imagined a unique work entitled A Corazón Abierto (Open Heart). For the finale, some twenty models emerged from the silence wearing immaculate white dresses inspired by the Dior archives. Placed over their hearts were phrases embroidered in red: words and drawings denouncing feminicide, expressing pain and suffering as well as joy and hope. In the pouring rain, as though the sky were rent asunder by tears, as if hearts were weeping, Elina Chauvet and Maria Grazia Chiuri brought the audience a vibrant moment of rare and dazzling intensity. |
