The Showcase Of Indian Mastery At The Paris Couture Week 2021 With Dior

Paris Couture Week unveiled its curtains earlier this month and celebrated the revival of the runway with much grandeur and poise. The week that is a celebration of Paris’ sartorial brilliance was the first to bring us back to normalcy after the year-long pandemic.

Paris Couture Week unveiled its curtains earlier this month and celebrated the revival of the runway with much grandeur and poise. The week that is a celebration of Paris’ sartorial brilliance was the first to bring us back to normalcy after the year-long pandemic. As various labels showcased their fall couture collection in this 4-day event, the opulence of Indian craftsmanship came alive on the initial day. 

This week of extravagance started with one of Paris’ oldest and quintessential brands Dior. The show opened with a tantalizing question of “what if women ruled the world?” Maria Grazia Chiuri, the Creative Director for Dior has worked with female artists quite often and for the Paris Couture week set design, she teamed up with the French artist Eva Jospin. Jospin was commissioned to develop life-sized, silk thread embroidery that will do justice to the theme. 

The set for the show, with its embroidered walls, showcased the utmost beauty of Indian craftsmanship. The tapestries developed for the set design for Dior’s Paris Couture Week show were based on the sketches given by Eva Jospin. The set walls were completely adorned with the hand-embroidered installations done by the artisans of the Chanakya Atelier and the students of the Chanakya School of Craft in India. The magnificent installation has been handcrafted with 400 shades of organic silk, cotton, linen, and jute threads. Sewn using a variation of 150 embroidery techniques, it took the artisans three months to complete the masterpiece.

Maria Grazia Chiuri has been working with Chanakya International for quite some time now. Being a legacy embroidery and production house, they have launched the Chanakya School of Embroidery recently. The school focuses on hand embroidery and training women in the craft. Since the craft was predominantly done by men, the school aims to hone the expertise of the females of the society for employable skills. The school was launched a few years ago by Monica Shaw and Karishma Swali. Since the 1980s, their families have been making embroideries for some international labels like Valentino, Gucci, Prada, and Lanvin. The school, founded by Shaw and Swali and a brainchild of Maria Grazia Chiuri, got its first breakthrough in the international space when Suzy Menkes did a wide-ranging story on them for Vogue international.

Chiuri’s promise to preserve craftsmanship and culture while empowering women has led to the birth of the Chanakya School of Craft in India. Though the work of the students is not aimed at the professional sphere, the showcase of their mastery at Paris Fashion Week will surely open creative horizons for them.