Nowadays it is an established trend for a prominent fashion house or designer creating costumes for a ballet. So Maria Grazia Chiuri's Dior costumes for one of the three ballets of the "Philip Glass Evening" programme at the Teatro dell'Opera in Rome, are perfectly on trend.
Running until 2nd April, the evening features "Hearts & Arrows" with choreography by Benjamin Millepied, "Glass Pieces" with choreography by Jerome Robbins, and "Nuit Blanche", choreographed by Sébastien Bertaud.
"Nuit Blanche" stars étoile Eleonora Abbagnato, director of the ballet corp of the Teatro dell'Opera and an étoile at the Opéra National de Paris, and étoile Friedemann Vogel, with a corps de ballet including 16 members.
In some ways Chiuri anticipated this collaboration with her S/S 19 collection for Dior, that featured a unique choreography by Tel Aviv-based Sharon Eyal, performed by Eyal herself and eight dancers from her company. The collection, as you may remember from a previous post, featured dresses that borrowed moods and colours from dancers' wardrobes, evoking at times the style of Pina Bausch, Loïe Fuller, Isadora Duncan and Margaret Morris.
Chiuri caught the dance bug last year when she was commissioned costumes for the American Ballet Theatre's Works & Progress at the Guggenheim for the piece "Falls the Shadow", choreographed by Alejandro Cerrudo. But the designer also worked previously with the Teatro dell'Opera in Rome: in 2016, when she was creative co-director at Valentino with Pierpaolo Piccioli, she designed with him the costumes for Giuseppe Verdi's "La Traviata", directed by Sofia Coppola.
The house of Dior is also not new to collaborations with ballets: the French designer collaborated indeed with Roland Petit on the ballet "Treize Danses" (1947), and one the most famous clients of the house was dancer Margot Fonteyn (Dior himself designed her wedding dress).
For "Nuit Blanche", Chiuri created a series of ethereal dresses that evoked the styles included in her S/S 19 collection: Abbagnato's full tulle skirt and Vogel's leggings came in mother-of-pearl shades, while the rest of the dancers were in black.
There was something uniting their styles though: handcrafted flowers in delicate pastel tones made by a workshop in Bologna were sandwiched between two layers of tulle that was then used for bodysuits and full skirts.
This was a way to pay homage to Dior's passion for flowers and gardens, but also an expedient to recreate the look of flowers pressed in old pages of books, their fragile beauty and colours frozen in time, representing tangible tokens of intangible memories (you can watch some clips about the making of the costumes for "Nuit Blanche" in all their handcrafted glory, on the Teatro dell'Opera Instagram page).
The visual impact was good, but to reach it Chiuri had to face some challenges such as finding a tulle that was firm but at the same time light enough to guarantee movement and dynamism to the dancers. The costumes were made with the workshop at the Teatro dell'Opera (that also worked with Chiuri for "La Traviata" costumes by Valentino).
Chiuri has a fascination with this place (the cocktail event that followed the performance also took place at the workshop) and she often compares the work produced there to the handcrafted beauty made at the Haute Couture laboratories in Paris.
Chiuri also feels there is an affinity between high fashion and ballet: both are pure forms of art, beautifully and elegantly crafted and they are the result of long hours of work. Yet in this case, while the costumes may have been filed under the couture category, they were also functional and Abbagnato helped Chiuri with the project, offering advice on fabrics and forms that may have helped the dancers in their performance.
This programme wasn't a challenge only costume-wise: Sébastien Bertaud (who collaborated last year with Balmain's Olivier Rousteing for a ballet at the Paris Opera), managed to create steps that went well with Glass' music and weren't secondary to it and that was no mean feat.
Moods developed from dark ones at the very beginning with the stage covered in a foggy atmosphere and the corps de ballet emerging from it in their black costumes. Then the movements changed from slow and sinuous to fast and the tulle skirts provided the best effects when the dancers were lifted by their partners.
In all this glory, there was a disappointing element: the costumes were branded, and the logo of the maison was visible on the elasticated straps.
This was absolutely unnecessary and denoted a lack of humility from the maison: so far we have seen prominent houses and designers collaborating with a corps de ballet without adding their names so visibly to the costumes.
This detail gave you the impression this was just another runway, a sponsored event or maybe a marketing opportunity (well, it was accompanied by a red carpet featuring with the usual influencers linked with Dior...).
Choosing not to include the name would have been a more discreet choice and wouldn't have refocused the attention on the brand (that already received a lot of publicity anyway...). Sure, the main reason behind such collaborations is to attract younger audiences, but if you're a purist and go to watch a ballet for the steps and the choreography and not for the costumes, you just don't want to see the name of a brand so visibly as that's distracting. So, despite its focus on craftsmanship and couture, "Nuit Blanche" is the first disappointing example of a visibly branded ballet we've had in recent years. May it be also the last one.
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