J'adore Japan: Dior's Enduring Love Affair with Japanese Culture
Amid fashion brands’ latest round of rotating creative directors (gleefully described by fashion journalists around the world as fashion’s musical chairs) a perennial question lingers: to design for the past or the future? At Christian Dior, creative director Maria Grazia Chiuri’s answer is clear. Design for both. Decades after Monsieur Dior’s passing, Chiuri has looked backwards, to the house’s archives — her rigorous references somewhere between awesome and intimidating — to create clothing for the present and future. In the process, she’s realized Mr. Dior’s dream of an uber-international brand, staging shows everywhere from Scotland to New York. But it’s the brand’s show location for fall 2025, Kyoto, that holds particular weight. Ahead of the show, SHOWstudio delves into Dior’s storied appreciation of Japan.
On a windswept seaside cliff in Granville, France, lives a pale pink home with whirling scarlet ironwork. Surrounded by fabulous gardens filled with English roses, who else could’ve grown up here but the indomitable Christian Dior? ‘My life, my style, owe almost everything to its location and its architecture,’ the designer wrote of the Belle Epoque home in his autobiography, Dior by Dior. A sentiment that stretched to the house’s interior, Dior recalled sitting and staring at stairway panels painted with Japonisme prints until his backside was bruised.
‘These versions of Utamaro and Hokusai made up my Sistine Chapel,’ Dior continued. ‘I still love those silks embroidered with flowers and fantastic birds and use them in my collections.’ Dior doubled down on his appreciation for Japan in 1953, when his eponymous haute couture house became the first to show in the country. A flurry of designs from his Paris collection were shown in Tokyo, Nagoya, Kyoto, and Osaka, including the aptly-named Jardin Japonais dress, which took inspiration from Japanese gardens. Later that year, Dior partnered with the Kanebo Textile Company and Daimaru Department Store, licensing both companies to adapt and reproduce the label’s patterns and textiles in Japan.
Dior's appreciation for Japanese culture was referenced at the house’s S/S 07 haute couture show, with a cinched satin coat printed with Katsushika Hokusai’s Great Wave. Its pleated bodice cresting into a frothy wave of a collar, the embellished oceanic block print sparkled under the show lights. In one look, then-creative director John Galliano had realised Dior’s childhood memories. Inspired by opera Madama Butterfly, the collection also included reinterpretations of kimonos and geisha-inspired makeup by the legendary Pat McGrath. Nearly two decades later and the collection continues to spark conversation and inspiration as a key moment in Galliano's unforgettable tenure at the maison.
When Raf Simons’ Dior traveled to Tokyo in 2014 for its first ever pre-fall collection, it went straight to a sumo wrestling stadium. Faux-snow rained down on models keeping warm in Fair Isle sweaters rendered in paillettes, waxed-cotton coats that nipped in at the waist, and sequined tops worn as a second skin. It was a fresh take on Japanese culture, one that wasn’t rooted in the literal. ‘I thought about Tokyo in relation to high fashion. I thought it always had something architecturally futuristic [about it]. Also, if I think about the design that comes from here — you know, like Rei [Kawakubo] and Yohji [Yamamoto] and [Issey] Miyake and all of these people — I thought it was interesting to innovate, take that all into account without going there, so there was no real literal Japanese inspiration or anything,” he told WWD ahead of the show.
Innovation struck again at Dior when Chiuri became the brand’s first female couturier. Making her debut during Paris’ 2017 couture season, her collection was ode to the whimsical gardens and full-figured blooms that often inspired Monsieur Dior. Months later, the brand reshowed its Spring 2017 Haute Couture collection in Tokyo to celebrate the opening of its largest store in Japan. In honor of the occasion, Chiuri included eight new looks inspired by Christian Dior’s Jardin Japonais.
How full circle, then, to hold Dior’s fall 2025 show in the gardens around Tō-ji Temple eight years later. Just as Chiuri’s predecessors had a signature aesthetic — and offered their own homage to Japan — Chiuri’s era will certainly be defined by the ways she’s refreshed the brand’s cultural identity by building on past design codes. She’s modernized the whittle-waisted ‘New Look’ to embody a fiercely feminist attitude, rather than specific silhouette. One can’t help but excitedly wonder how she’ll reimagine Dior’s history with Japan to create something all of her own.