MARIE SCHULLER, Lampoon
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The angels of temperance – Marie Schuller for Lampoon Issue 13

Art is what all her work for Dior has in common. It shines through in an unfettered experience via assonance, never theoretic or orthodox – fast-forward and rewind, a conversation with Maria Grazia Chiuri

Art is what all her work for Dior has in common

It shines through in an unfettered experience via assonance, never theoretic or orthodox. Art that dialogues with the female figure on the twists and turns of the Twentieth century, explored as an ideal laboratory, embracing a territorial outpost. The latest prêt-àporter collection with its multi-coloured energy of the youthquake, all protestors and barricades, reveals echoes of Nouveau Réalisme and New Dada, references to Rotella, clips from films by Bellocchio. Work on crochet and embroidery provides fodder for new reasoning after reading the book The Subversive Stitch by Rozsika Parker.

«Surrealism has become the cornerstone for this comparison game of mine», says Maria Grazia Chiuri, «for its, at times volatile, allegoric implications, for its fluid quality of expression. A digression into dreams that overflows into nightmares, a psychoanalytical chiaroscuro drift that belonged to me— clocks, dripping landscapes and floating anatomies. I feel it is similar to our present, contradictory and packed with similitudes, with the apprehension and impetus of our age. I invented conversation with some of its exponents. Claude Cahun. Artist and writer. Political and militant in the French resistance during Nazi occupation. A precursor of Cindy Sherman and Gillian Wearing, celebrated by David Bowie, the master of transformation».

Claude Cahun, the pseudonym of Lucy Renée Mathilde Schwob, was born in Nantes on 1894

A declared homosexual with cultured Jewish roots, in her writings she moves beyond the frontier of a third gender, «Shuffle the cards. Masculine? Feminine?» she emphasized in her autobiography, Disavowals: or Cancelled confessions. Maria Grazia Chiuri adds, «It depends on the situation. Neuter is the only gender that always suits me». Claude Cahun used to shave her head and wore oversize, masculine suits and coats. She chose to exile herself on the Anglo-Norman island of Jersey in 1937. She ended up in prison, some of her works were declared pornographic and destroyed. She was a friend of André Breton, Meret Oppenheim and Benjamin Péret. Her life was an epic story of diversity and a declaration of autonomy at any cost. «I share Claude Cahun’s axiom», continues Chiuri, «that we are all different. I like her role-playing, without any need for collocations.

If fashion reasons over and beyond stereotypes, Claude Cahun is totally on–trend in the techniques she explored, in her idea of clothing that uses the body for definition. Her works represent different kinds of identity, showing the plurality of the subject. She is not lacking in irony and curiosity». Chiuri ponders the current situation, «I think that fashion today has lost its classic role as a status symbol and has become a laboratory. When I started twenty-eight years ago, fashion was fun. We used to go to flea markets looking for a bargain. We were not as aware as this new generation. Information now spreads like wildfire and it is immediately shared, available. To paraphrase Claude Cahun, the body serves for self-definition, fashion is a story told to construct personal stories. An identity diagram». 

Maria Grazia Chiuri’s black and white wanted to be graphic

«Haute Couture is a different cosmos. By constitution, it is suspended on a chronological flow. I have steeped the winter collection in black and white, pivoting on a surrealist mood that is part Cocteau and Delvaux, part Leonor Fini and Magritte. The splitting of reality like an oxymoron. Balanced between a dreamlike impulse and reality, between real and imaginary». Maria Grazia Chiuri’s black and white wanted to be graphic, it weaved an editing grid that pulled in the symbol and enhanced its sacral craftsmanship. «I am only interested in the inevitable theatricality of life», stated Leonor Fini, the scandalous ange noir of the Surrealists. Of rather gothic charisma, she was born in Argentina but grew up in the post-Hapsburg Trieste of Umberto Saba and Italo Svevo. Leonor Fini was a Medusa-like tomboy who, after leaving Italy, in 1931 organized her first exhibition in Paris in the gallery opened three years earlier by Christian Dior. 

She was also getting romantically involved in what was to be a mainly stormy relationship with the poet André Pieyre de Mandiargues, introduced to her by Henri Cartier-Bresson. During those years, Max Ernst rechristened her the Italian fury in Paris. «I come from an Italian tradition of ‘tailoring’ origin», continues Maria Grazia Chiuri, «which supports work by the atelier and the use of techniques perfected in centuries of history against the demiurgic method of the French school. I tackled the question of haute couture by attempting to unite these two contrasting yet complementary souls in a harmonious whole. The story of couture is linked to that of modern art. It is the only place where you can dare and experiment at maximum levels of technology, form and material». Candid fragments of anatomy are mirrored on the checkerboard floor to reiterate the surrealist canon. Mystery, breakdown of sense and dizziness, mask and maze. A ginormous empty metal birdcage transforms into réseau of black tubular fabric that wraps around the body and highlights transparent effects. 

Claude Lalanne invented flowers, butterflies, and spikey metal branches that seem to come alive in contact with the body, as if by magic

This was last summer’s couture. «I went to visit her in her workshop outside Paris, a kind of Aladdin’s cave of wonders where she spends her days creating», says Chiuri. «She is the living memory of a myriad of stories and artistic relationships, a bridge built between Europe and the USA thanks to her link with Larry Rivers and Jimmy Metcalf, her familiarity with Serge Gainsbourg and Yves Saint-Laurent. When it was time for the fitting before the runway show, Claude started to shape belts with her hands. Quite natural for her, quite surprising for us».

«You need a vivid, shrill colour palette», continues Chiuri, «to go back to Niki de Saint-Phalle: her esoteric textures of mirrors teamed with lace, silk, leather and plastic. I deliberately lost myself following her Nanas – an off-the-scale concept of women, volumetric mother gods and wild pop idols, among colourful hearts and the tree of love. I found her enigma in The Tarot Garden in Garavicchio, in Maremma, a hieratic reworking of plant Wunderkammers, of the grottoes and monsters of Mannerism. Niki explored reflections expounded in the pamphlet-manifesto that Linda Nochlin published in 1971, wondering why no women artists had violated the all-male debate of the history of art. In 1961, Niki introduced an essential figure into Dior narration: Marc Bohan, who had taken over from Yves Saint-Laurent at the head of the fashion house. Having cut his teeth on the brand’s American and British markets, Bohan was the helmsman steering through the unrest of the epochal changes in the Sixties and Seventies. He directed the transformation». 

«As in all fairy tales, along the path to the treasure chest I met dragons, witches, sorcerers and the Angel of Temperance,’ said Niki de Saint-Phalle. And you need lots of temperance. You also need respect, daring and a pinch of fatalism. Dior is a fashion house full of symbols. Christian Dior was the first hero after the war in France. A light in the dark. The birth of the New Look in 1947, is engraved in the DNA of an entire country. A sliver of a dream absorbed by a whole nation, as was clear from the title of the exhibition at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris – Christian Dior, Couturier du Rêve. Gradually, with humility and curiosity, I have come closer to a part of French culture that I did not know. I brought with me a foundation of thought and a background in the figurative art, linked to the twentieth-century Italian movements, thanks to my relationship with Carla Accardi and her lean graphics, with Dadamaino, and Giosetta Fioroni with her visionary world. I am attracted by the debate on what it means to be an artist, on the ultimate sense of research». Fashion today can once again find its aloof, mystic, mysterious universe, hidden behind scarlet velvet curtains in ateliers, where what must be done is done: work and study.

Photography Marie Schuller

Stylist Francesca Pinna. Dior Pre-Fall 2018.

Art Direction Alessandro Fornaro
Make-Up Lorenzo Zavatta
Hair Stefano Gatti
Photography Assistant Alessandro Gamba
Set Designer Victoria Salomoni
Digital Tech Tommaso Bazzi
Post-Production Jonathan Oliver
Set Assistant Soraja Cehic
Producer Annalaura Masciavè
Special Thanks To Potafiori, Metal Net Ttm Rossi – Www.Ttmrossi.It
Model Caroline Schürch @Women Management

Cesare Cunaccia

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