After a two-day adventure around the palaces of Marrakech, on Monday evening Maria Grazia Chiuri invited guests to the Palais El Badi for her Dior Cruise 2020 show. Surrounded by the terracotta colonnades of the 16th century fortress, models walked around the courtyard’s epic pool set alight with hundreds of torches glistening above the surface, giant bonfires cutting through the Moroccan night. This was a collection close to the heart of Chiuri: a cultural exchange between the codes of Dior and the pan-African craftsmanship she has always admired. Working with traditional wax print fabric manufactured in the Ivory Coast, she fused the trademarks of Dior – toile de jouy, tarot card motifs and the New Look silhouette – with a fabric, whose history is as cross-cultural as her clientele. “The real thing for me wasn’t just to speak about craftsmanship from around the world, but to go around the world and see the codes of Dior from different points of view,” Chiuri said, noting how wax fabric originated in Europe, then travelled to Asia and eventually found a home on the African continent.
