On the back of successful tours of London, Paris and Shanghai, an exhibition that chronicles the legacy of Christian Dior is coming to the Middle East.
Dior has just announced that Christian Dior: Designer of Dreams will open at Qatari design hub M7 in Doha in November. While exact dates are yet to be released, the show is scheduled to run for four months, until March 2022.
Covering 70 years of Dior design, the show will encompass the work of the eponymous brand's founder, from the famous "new look" that started it all in 1947, through his love of the Palace of Versailles in Paris, and the gardens that gave him so much inspiration. The exhibition will also outline how, after Dior's death in 1957, designers such as Yves Saint Laurent and Marc Bohan continued the house, drawing threads from Dior's work into their own.
A rare display of haute couture by Dior's successors Saint Laurent and Bohan, as well as Gianfranco Ferre and John Galliano, will be displayed as part of the exhibition, along with the more recent designs of Raf Simons, and the house's present creative director Maria Grazia Chiuri.
Having started its tour in Paris in 2019, the show travelled to London and Shanghai, before it was halted by the pandemic. Now, as the world begins to cautiously reopen, Dior is celebrating by staging not one, but two simultaneous exhibitions. The first will open in New York in September, while a different version will arrive in Qatar in November.
Both are curated by Olivier Gabet, director of the Musee des Arts Decoratifs, Paris, who will redesign the exhibition especially for Qatar, to include new scenography and pieces previously never seen before in public. The show will also include pieces from the museum that reflect the label.
