Dior Fall 2021 collection “Manga Phantasmagoria” at Shanghai Fashion Week. Review by Eleonora de Gray, Editor-in-Chief of RUNWAY MAGAZINE.

Shanghai Fashion Week today is a “place to be”, literally. Let’s get “Physical”… fashion brands who could afford it went there to present their collections, doing fashion shows. Many brands are complaining that digital fashion presentation of the collection doesn’t work. Strangely enough these brands forgot to mention that apart from paying to social media networks for fake followers, fake likes and fake views nothing else has been done. Fake followers do not express the opinion or buy. So this occasion to show even far away the collection looks like a fabulous way to back to the desired feature.

Christian Dior it is of course an invited with honors house who showed special collection inspired by Manga. Maria Grazia Chiuri, designer of Dior house, after exploring her personal emotions, and telling dark fairy tales to public in Fall Winter 2021-2022 collection “Dark Tinker Bell” she presented in Paris, she decided to go a little “lighter” on goosebumps stories, and showed a Manga-Disco story to Chinese public, as corny as it could be. Long Museum West Bund in Shanghai had seen everything but not that. She turned the museum into discotheque.

“Girly girls”, manga models were wearing Dior monogram coats and rags. “The show reinterprets a range of themes and revisits the Dior vocabulary with a transversal pop aesthetic, from Richard Hamilton’s English pop to the rather acidic new futurism of Marco Lodola,” – said Maria Grazia Chiuri. But no matter how hard she is trying to have her ties with Mr Christian Dior, disco manga and rock-n-roll is not this kind of thing, no matter how “fairy lady” it might looks like… to Maria Grazia Chiuri that is.

“A coat in the iconic leopard print, one of monsieur Dior’s hallmark designs, features among the emblematic pieces,” – she said. Well… iconic leopard print never actually was one of the Christian Dior’s most known. Like any designer he used it of course but Dior was never about leopard print, he was more about polka dots. She got confused. Leonard print is a print largely in use by Italian houses like Roberto Cavalli or Dolce Gabbana, but still it is never represented an identity of a brand. Everybody use it.

Manga Disco girls in “So Cheesy” story of Maria Grazia Chiuri presented for Fall 2021 in Shanghai certainly should be interpreted as a cute version of “Dark Tinker Bell”. And by the look at it, it is. According to the designer the line between scary and cheesy is very thin, and specially when she showed it to Chinese public.

And there’s always place for the public opinion. Even in the fashion world we live in democracy. After all this is buyer opinion…

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