Find almost 100 haute couture designs at SCAD FASH’s new Dior exhibit
“Dior: Crafting Fashion” at SCAD FASH Museum of Fashion + Film is among the fashion museum’s best exhibitions to date.
Ostensibly centered on the decisive artistic vision of the French fashion designer Christian Dior, the show is much more: an informative deep dive into the intricacies of designing couture (or one-of-a-kind) garments from Dior’s midcentury heyday up through now and includes almost 100 haute couture designs.
Speaking from her Paris office, exhibition curator for Christian Dior Couture Hélène Starkman, pointed out that the exhibition was created with its university setting at SCAD’s Atlanta campus in mind, and tailored to appeal to students majoring in fashion, illustration or other creative disciplines.
“It’s really important that this knowledge of couture gets shared,” said Starkman. She noted that Dior demonstrated the same desire to educate younger fashion students when he gave a 1955 lecture at Paris university the Sorbonne.
Non-SCAD student audiences can also enjoy this deep dive into both Dior’s distinctive house style and the exhibition’s inside look at the fascinating mechanics of a couture atelier.
For those who might dismiss fashion as simply a commercial enterprise, “Crafting Fashion” leaves no doubt that it is also art, a foundation laid by Christian Dior’s own life experiences and interests.
Who was Christian Dior?
Dior once operated an art gallery in Paris where he showed Picasso, Matisse and Surrealist artists including Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst and Marcel Duchamp. He had an ongoing interest in creativity before opening his design house at 30 Avenue Montaigne in 1946. He worked for a time as an illustrator and had considered becoming an architect. While he never pursued that profession, he brought an architect’s vision to his fashion designs, said Starkman.
“He said that the dress was an ephemeral architecture for him, designed to enhance the feature of the woman’s body,” she said.
That commitment to art and experimentation is shown to be a throughline as subsequent designers have helmed Dior, executive director of SCAD FASH Alex Delotch Davis said during a tour of the exhibition.
“Each of these designers references fine art, or has a tremendous affinity and knowledge of fine art from Dior going forward,” said Davis.
Starkman noted the importance for students to be immersed in creative disciplines beyond fashion to have a fully formed vision and image bank to draw from
A case in point is the fluid, bell-shaped Jonathan Anderson black dress included in “Crafting Fashion,” a sculptural look that the designer modeled on Kenyan-born artist Magdalene Odundo’s elegant ceramic vessels.
Following his runaway show for his spring 2026 Dior collection, Anderson displayed his creations publicly at the Musée Rodin in Paris, said Starkman, to allow fashion fans without the deep pockets to attend a runway show to see his work up close.
What to expect at ‘Dior: Crafting Fashion’ at SCAD FASH
A remarkable transformation of the SCAD FASH space by SCAD exhibition designer Trang Vu makes “Crafting Fashion” feel like a kaleidoscopic version of the Versailles Hall of Mirrors with a new treasure revealed with each new layer.
The opening room of the seven sections featured in the exhibition represents a kind of artist’s atelier. The room illustrates how Dior and the seven designers who went on to helm his design house, including 19-year-old Yves Saint Laurent, Marc Bohan, Gianfranco Ferré, John Galliano, Raf Simmons, Maria Grazia Chiuri and now Anderson carried the Dior legacy forward while also imprinting the label with their own point of view.
Each room in the exhibition intersperses work by Dior with garments by those seven designers, along with an array of supplementary material. In fabric samples, sketches and photographs of the designers at work, the exhibition offers a behind-the-scenes glimpse of the couture process. There are rarities too, like the subdued tangerine-colored suit designed by Bohan and worn in 1967 by Olivia de Havilland on a trip to Atlanta for the widescreen re-release of “Gone With the Wind.”
Subsequent galleries show the elaborate mimicry involved in constructing toiles, the patterns for couture dresses crafted from muslin or paper on mannequins. And like a Rive Gauche shop window designed by Ladurée, the glass cases that house a survey of Lady Dior purse designs is a fashion candy shop for couture junkies.
Another example of the couture house’s investment in the visual arts, the Lady Dior project represents a 15-year collaboration with visual artists who interpret the bag (including one current Atlantan, Patrick Eugène, and one former Atlantan, Shara Hughes).
Other rooms display runway looks and Dior gowns worn by celebrities from Lady Gaga to Jennifer Lawrence. There are photographs of models, mood boards, shoes that accompanied dresses down the runway and even hats created by British milliner Stephen Jones, who was on hand at SCAD FASH to install his designs, said SCAD exhibitions and program manager Stephanie Ray.
But even those seductive riches are nothing next to the most exquisite room “Dior Gardens”: a group of dresses that show Dior’s ongoing fascination with the natural world and flowers as metaphors for femininity.
Dior grew up on the French coast of Normandy with a mother who adored gardening.
“He says in his memoirs that he was learning the name of the seeds and the name of the flowers by heart from the seed catalogs,” Starkman said. “And this is also why there’s one of those seed catalogs exhibited in the exhibition.”
Dior carried that early love of botanicals with him as a designer. The parade of exquisitely romantic, feminine dresses in “Dior Gardens” is framed with an installation of cut paper plants, grasses and flowers from the Wanda Barcelona artist collective that takes your breath away.
IF YOU GO
“Dior: Crafting Fashion”
Through August 23. 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday, noon-5 p.m. Sunday. $5-$10 (free for college students with ID). SCAD FASH Museum of Fashion + Film, 1600 Peachtree St. NW, Atlanta. 404-253-3132, scadfash.org
