Looking close up at the black tulle skirt and cropped zippered jacket from Dior's Pre-Fall 2021 collection covered in round mirror sequins, one of the first thing that comes to mind is Pop Art or even Damien Hirst's spot paintings (View this photo).
There is definitely Pop Art behind this collection, characterised by bright and bold colours that should instill confidence and a sense of optimism among consumers in the dark times we are living in.
Yet, apart from Pop Art, there's something else as well behind this collection: hoping to offer consumers the chance to give an energetic twist to their lives after a very difficult year dominated by Coronavirus, Dior designer Maria Grazia Chiuri added some playfulness to the collection moving from Elio Fiorucci and his iconic boutiques.
Fiorucci boutiques in MIlan, London New York and Los Angeles entered the history of retail and culture as they were conceived as meeting places.
Designed by Ettore Sottsass, Andrea Branzi and Franco Marabelli, the store on East 59th Street, New York, for example became particularly iconic: Andy Warhol, who loved its plasticky and colourful design, launched there his Interview magazine; Truman Capote signed books in the window; people gravitating around Studio 54 would hang around there (together with a very young Marc Jacobs); illustrator Antonio Lopez styled the windows; Joey Arias and theatrical German countertenor Klaus Nomi with a bunch of crazy people and colourful shop assistants would be dancing in the same windows; spotted by Madonna's stylist Maripol, who was at the time also in charge of finding young designers to showcase at Fiorucci's, Isabel and Ruben Toledo were offered a prime spot in a concession stand at the store where they enlisted the help of a very special sale assistant, model and filmmaker Suzie Zabrowska. 
Fiorucci stores were crowded with young people who loved shopping there because they considered it a place where they could express through the avant-garde clothes and accessories on sale there their passion for rebellion and transgression, and for a firm hope to distinguish and separate themselves from their parents.
At Fiorucci you could easily find hard plastic bags in fluorescent shades, scarves in the most incredible colours, sandals with thick rubber soles and glittering elastics that you would slip on and keep on your feet for hours on end on torrid summer days without ever getting one blister; not to mention the fun hairpins with colourful plastic planets, and the endless products with the little cool angels.
The atmosphere of the boutique and its products offered a visual, aesthetic and artistic revolution, aspects that inspired Chiuri while she worked on Dior's Pre-Fall 2021 collection.
Mitzah Bricard, Dior's muse and the fashion house's head of millinery, was evoked in Chiuri's leopard print designs that were filtered through the Pop Art aesthetics of Fiorucci, and looked therefore younger and more rebellious.
There were other inspirations that pointed at Fiorucci, such as the fluorescent colours, the see-through PVC raincoats, the minidresses in tulle covered in mirror dots recreating Fiorucci's metallic party dresses and the 8-bit T-Rex prints on a bright orange background, reminiscent of Fiorucci's 8-bit pin-up. 
The spirit of Fiorucci was also evoked via Maripol's Polaroids (Chiuri invited her to capture the mood of the collection for the lookbook), but also via some of the poses and the colour combinations of the lookbook. Some images showed for example similarities with the graphics conceived by Fiorucci for its adverts and posters (remember how Fiorucci's models were usually portrayed from the back as they looked out at the horizon).
In 1984 Fiorucci released what became an iconic piece of Pop culture, a Panini stickers album, in which 200 of the best, kitschest and craziest posters were turned into collectible stickers. Around 100 stickers were designed by i-D founder and editor-in-chief and Fiorucci store's Creative Director Terry Jones (Elio Fiorucci also supported i-D magazine during its most critical years, between 1983 and 1984). If you leaf through that album you may spot some similarities between the vintage images and Dior's new lookbook.
Yet despite the fun aspects borrowed from Fiorucci, Chiuri forgot one key point: Fiorucci was conceived as the antithesis of luxury, it sold irresistible but still affordable products and was designed to be a market of ideas and things; Dior remains a high-end brand with its own boutiques and a precise and crystallised style code, and despite the optimism of this collection and the desire to reach out to a younger audience as well, the results weren't completely convincing. In a nutshell, when a luxury collection appropriates the vocabulary of a pop collection it doesn't mean that the former has genuinely managed to speak the language of the latter.
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