We met Eva Jospin, the artist who imagined the decor for the Dior's Haute Couture show
It is in the heart of a fully embroidered case that Maria Grazia Chiuri presented her Dior Haute Couture Fall-Winter 2021/22 show this Monday, July 5, 2021.
Ninety-five meters long by 3.5 meters high: these are the spectacular measurements of the decor used for the Dior Haute Couture Fall-Winter 2021 Show. A decoration entirely embroidered by hand — a true work of art entitled Silk Room and imagined by the French artist Eva Jospin.
Double reference to the Salle aux Broderies of the Colonna Palace in Rome and to the feminist manifesto of Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own, this work was created using the exceptional know-how of the Chanakya's School Of Craft in Mumbai: a non-profit institute that preserves the best professions in the world, with a particular emphasis on innovation, preservation, and the empowerment of women.
For the making of this gallery with 350 m2 of embroidery, the craftsmen of the Chanakya workshops and the Chanakya School of Craft have created, in permanent dialogue with the artist, a virtuoso composition of 400 different shades. "Eva Jospin's drawing revisits her own vocabulary, where nymphaeums and cenotaphs are displayed, utopian landscapes and monuments, inspired by 18th-century Capriccios. Forests, lianas, rocks, waterfalls constitute a place conducive to reverie and to strolling, like the follies of baroque gardens. A textile architecture of grandiose proportions, inspired by the beauty of the works of the Nabis, Vuillard or Bonnard, and exalting the power of collective work dear to Maria Grazia Chiuri ", emphasizes the house of Dior.
This is not the first time that the brand has collaborated with Chanakya. Already last year — for the Spring-Summer 2020 Haute Couture Show — artist, Judy Chicago who imagined banners with feminist messages for the show, called on 150 students from the Chanakya craft school: Mumbai School of Craft.
A partnership renewed this year under the leadership of Maria Grazia Chiuri, allowing Eva Jospin to explore embroidery — even though her favorite material is cardboard. On the sidelines of the show, the artist-visual artist has also delivered on this major challenge.
Can you introduce yourself in a few words?
I am an artist, I mainly do sculpture, but also drawing. For the Dior show, I designed and coloured a huge cardboard that was used for this embroidery that you see on the walls. It is a promenade that will be visible today for the guests of the parade, and at the Rodin Museum then for the public until July 11.
Since cardboard is your material of choice, how did you get to grips with embroidery?
It was very interesting to work with embroidery, first of all, because I had wanted to do it for a very long time. It's a project that has been going through my mind since 2016 with my discovery of the Colonna Palace in Rome, and of the Indian embroidery room, which is an absolute marvel. It is a piece entirely embroidered by hand, with an 18th century embroidery, and I wanted to transcribe my designs in threads, and therefore in equally colorful threads. It was also a way of working with artisans. I tend to put my hand everywhere and fine-tune every detail, but I also wanted to rely on know-how. I am a huge fan of general craftsmanship and the hand, and all that is the prowess of the hand. Embroidery interested me particularly because there is a possible repentance. You can always transform, undo, and it's very close to painting. We apply a thread as we apply a touch of colour.
Who supported you in this project?
It was a wonderful dialogue, first of all with Stéphanie Ovide — textile restorer, who accompanied me on this project and was at the same time as me at the Villa Medici when I discovered the Colonna Palace. I then took her to the first prototypes of this project and then with the Chanakya workshops, who did the embroidery entirely and did an absolutely spectacular job. I think that the common point between my work, what I can do myself, and this collaborative project, is that we get lost in the details. We are caught in the immensity of the decor, and then when we approach, each point, each thread is embroidered. It is a madness of loss of reference marks and change of scale. I hope that there will be plenty of people to see it afterwards and who will also want to get lost in all these details.
How did the collaboration with Maria Grazia Chiuri go?
It was really wonderful, first of all, because there was, at the start, an incredible coincidence. She was a huge fan of the Indian embroidery room at Palazzo Colonna, which a lot of people know. So, I told her about the project I had, because she too is a great connoisseur of textile work in general, of embroidery in particular, of all this craftsmanship. She told me that it would be amazing to do this project for the show. I think she had two ideas in mind: the first is that she loves to collaborate with artists and give them carte blanche for a show and give them the means to realize a dream that they have had for a long time, which I think was also the case with Judy Chicago. And the second is to show the incredible technique of these Indian embroiderers with whom she has worked for 25 years and honour them. This makes perfect sense in an haute couture show because it is an exceptional piece of work, both on the collection it presents, and on what we will see on the walls. These are totally out of the ordinary, exceptional things that make you dream.
Fashion, is it a playground in which you have fun?
I love fashion, but I don't necessarily follow it well. I have always adored fashion, like many women, we still kept this chance to play with clothing. This is less of the case with men — because for some time now, men's costume since the 19th century has been very coded, which was not the case before. So they play less than us. We've been playing forever, so I love it. But it's true that there, on this project, I had the impression of being a little mouse, of attending the fittings of the parade, of seeing Maria Grazia developing her universe, and the quality of her work. So it was also wonderful to attend, like a spectator of a world which is not my universe and which fascinated me. And I am very grateful to Maria Grazia.
