CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 2/9/2023

Pure Couture

Featured image—of Gianfranco Ferré's 1989 Vincennes evening gown for Christian Dior—is reproduced from Delpire & Co.'s evocative new three-volume visual history of the French fashion house as imagined by contemporary photographer Sarah Moon. The first volume, starring "timeless" Majorcan model Andrea Gutiérrez, presents Dior's original work, 1947 to 1957, shot in luminous black-and-white. The second volume, introducing subtle color, explores the Dior archives, with designs by Yves Saint Laurent, Marc Bohan, Gianfranco Ferré, John Galliano, Raf Simons and current creative director Maria Grazia. Volume three presents 38 photographs made in dialogue with Chiuri. "Sarah Moon’s personal style, it seems to me, rests in her ability to give shape to unconscious movements and self-reflexive intuitions," Chiuri writes, "her ability to express, through her images, feelings and moods that words struggle to describe.… For me her shifting, intimate atmosphere, suspended in time, is such a fitting visual representation of my constant travels between the past and the present, through which I create images for the future. There is something truly special, magical, in these images, an interweaving of the vision of the house of Dior, which has always sought to interpret and represent the contemporary woman, and the feminine vision of Sarah Moon, imperfect, permeable and charged with emotion."

IMAGE CREDIT: Vincennes, Gianfranco Ferré for Christian Dior. Evening gown, Autumn/Winter 1989 © Sarah Moon