Dior by Sarah Moon

 

“Fabric is the sole impetus of our dreams. And fashion, in short, is the result of a dream, and dreams are a form of escape.”, Christian Dior wrote in his memoirs.

 

An elusive and impalpable dream of fashion that Sarah Moon nonetheless manages to capture in her evanescent and powerfully textured photos. A pictorial and gestural form of poetry, transcending the Dior spirit and style, which expresses the force emanating from the silhouettes imagined by Christian Dior and his successors, particularly those of Maria Grazia Chiuri, Creative Director of Dior women’s collections. An ode to multifaceted femininity, sublime by its very complexity, the work of Sarah Moon is unveiled in an outstanding edition of three beautiful books, each celebrating the many facets of Dior and the architectural essence of its creations. The first volume presents a selection of staged compositions, which explore the variations of black and white in their infinity, with a special focus on the iconic models of Christian Dior from 1947 to 1957. These images are marked by the grace of the Majorcan model Andrea Gutiérrez, “who embodied that timeless woman, of yesterday or today” as the photographer wrote in her preface.

 

Turning at times to color, the photos shared in the second book go back in time in an exploration of the Dior archives. Signed by Yves Saint Laurent, Marc Bohan, Gianfranco Ferré, John Galliano, Raf Simons and Maria Grazia Chiuri, the pieces and their adjoining texts by Olivier Saillard relate thus while facing the artist’s lens, the history of a House in perpetual movement.

 

The third opus reproduces Sarah Moon’s conversation with Maria Grazia Chiuri initiated in 2016. Haloed in a blur that bestows a magnetic aura, the images invite the reader to discover the singular relationship uniting the two women and display the evolution of the Creative Director’s work step by step, putting it thus into perspective.

 

“It is via her images that I discovered fashion during my studies. They came to the surface again when I arrived at Dior and started looking for new interpretations of femininity in fashion design (…). Sarah Moon’s signature resides in her capacity to give form to unconscious movements and retrospective intuition, and in her aptitude to image indescribable ambiences. For all these reasons, her vision was perfect for transcribing the story told by my creative process for the Dior collections: that of a woman anchored in her epoch, drawing her strength by listening to her emotions”.