After Dior’s spring/summer 2020 show set made a powerful statement on climate change, the French fashion house has pledged a message of cultural intent for autumn/winter 2020. Dior has inked a five-year partnership with the Musée du Louvre to help restore the Jardin des Tuileries, the lush setting of its latest seasonal presentation.
“This patronage brings home a message that is more vital now than ever. Each of us can be an agent of change for the ecosystems of tomorrow, whether natural or cultural,” said the house. Between 2020 and 2024, it will fund several major refurbishment projects within the public gardens and UNESCO World Heritage site, including the reopening of the northeastern woodland area, which is home to 116 trees of four species.
Dior’s autumn/winter 2020 show will take place in a temporary space overlooking the famous octagonal fountain near the Place de la Concorde park entrance – a stone’s throw away from the Espace Éphémère des Tuileries: a popular Paris Fashion Week venue. The house has not outlined whether the structure will be recycled, as per its spring/summer 2020 set, for which it partnered with Coloco, a collective of botanists and urban landscapers. The last ephemeral garden, populated by 164 trees sourced from nurseries in France, Germany and Italy, continued its life via a series of sustainability projects promoting the #PlantingForTheFuture movement in Paris.
“The message in the spring/summer 2020 collection is the idea of taking care of everyone, of the world we live in, just as Catherine Dior [Christian Dior’s younger sister, who was the muse of the season] and other women in history took care of their gardens,” creative director Maria Grazia Chiuri told British Vogue at the time. “All modern ideas of feminism talk about humans and nature and bringing these two worlds closer together again.”
The brand’s celebration of nature on 25 February is in line with the Dior family’s green-fingered roots, but how much has changed in the brand’s internal eco-conscious practices since its show played out among trees, not flowers, in September? Those small but vital steps towards transparency and circularity don’t make headlines, but are no less vital to overturning fashion’s current outdated and damaging systems.
Originally published on British Vogue.
Editor
Alice NewboldCredit
Header image: Peter White/Getty Images
