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It is not every Dior show that opens with a skirl of bagpipes, three different ways to wear violet tartan, and a sporran dangling from a belt in place of a clutch bag tucked under the arm. Dior’s first catwalk show in Scotland for 70 years, held in Perthshire on Monday evening, was a feistily gorgeous affair.
The pomp and ceremony of a Parisian fashion house met its match in the natural grandeur and splendour of Scotland. Dior is a luxury juggernaut that its designer, Maria Grazia Chiuri, has described as being “like the national football team” of fashion; but the gardens of Drummond Castle in Perthshire are also no stranger to glamour, having appeared on screen in Rob Roy and Outlander. It proved a formidable combination. To judge by the weather, the auld alliance between France and Scotland seems to hold: the topiary-studded paths of formal gardens known as “the Versailles of Scotland” became a dazzling catwalk under clear blue skies.
Chiuri went deep into Scottish influence with every look. There were maps of Scotland traced on to dresses, Jacobean black velvets, wading gaiters, and a palette of yellows, purples and greens which Chiuri borrowed from the “cinematic” landscape seen while visiting tweed and cashmere suppliers, during the planning of this collection. Chain mail details and tough leather boots hinted at Scotland’s sometimes bloody history. (There were notes, too, of Game of Thrones.) Chiuri, 60, is of a generation whose chief association of tartan is with punk; the ghost of Vivienne Westwood appeared here, along with that of Mary, Queen of Scots.
Chiuri thoroughly mined the beauty of Scotland for items that will ring the coffers in Dior boutiques, but she also gave back. Kilts were made in collaboration with the young Scottish designer Samantha McCoach, whose Le Kilt label is updating the tradition for a new generation of wearers. Harris tweed, Johnstons of Elgin and Esk Cashmere have all benefited from contracts to supply clothes for this collection. “This is not just a moment of pretend Scottishness engineered for the catwalk, it is making real work for those Scottish businesses,” said Justine Picardie, the author of several books about Dior, who collaborated with Chiuri on her research.
Backstage before the show, Chiuri said she wanted to highlight the textile heritage of Scotland. “When we talk about fashion now, we often speak about brands,” she said. “But really fashion is about people who make clothes, and I want to talk about them instead.”
In reality, a lavish show for 550 guests including the actors Anya Taylor-Joy and Rosamund Pike, the Spice Girl Geri Horner and the tennis player Emma Raducanu is very much about the brand. Images from Dior’s last show in Scotland, held in the mirrored ballroom of the nearby Gleneagles hotel in 1955, were montaged on to trench coats and tote bags, a homage to the founder Christian Dior’s bond with Scotland. One of the photos shows the designer peeking from backstage as his gloved and hatted models catwalk through the ballroom. “I’ve never seen such a happy picture of him,” noted Picardie. Dior later wrote in his memoir that the country was “even more beautiful than I imagined”. Chiuri believes the sculpted waist of Dior’s famous bar jacket, and the pleated skirts of his 1947 New Look, were inspired by the elegant silhouette of tweed tailored jackets and kilts, which Dior admired. The Gleneagles ballroom, Chiuri’s first choice for this season’s show, proved too small for an audience on today’s luxury scale, but the hotel is hosting an exhibition of Dior dresses.
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Chiuri’s interests lie in dress as a creative outlet and a mode of female self-expression, rather than in fashion as a form of patriarchal control of women via the tightening of corsets. Mary, Queen of Scots, a woman fighting for agency and for survival in a ruthless, male-dominated society, was an important figure in this collection, which drew on Embroidering Her Truth, Clare Hunter’s alternative biography, which looks at how the imprisoned queen used embroidery as a way to send political messages – a mouse trapped in the claws of a red cat is a metaphor for her entrapment by her red-haired cousin Elizabeth – and to leave a personal record of her version of events. One model wore a corset with words including “Emotional, Moody, Difficult, Fierce, Nag” embroidered in gothic script, like a defiant slogan T-shirt for a long-dead queen of Scotland.