Dior Hosts Dinner in Celebration of Judy Chicago’s New Show in London
On Tuesday night, Dior hosted a lavish dinner to celebrate the opening of Judy Chicago’s retrospective at the Serpentine Galleries in London.
During the night, Chicago shared with guests how her collaboration with Dior has changed the way she perceives fashion.
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“When we were in Paris, I went to the Dior archive and they pulled out unbelievable pieces with incredible needlework. As you know from the show, I’ve done a lot of designing with needlework. I’m thinking to myself, I have more in common with the reverence for craft in fashion than I do with the disdain for craft in contemporary art,” she said.
The 85-year-old American artist said before meeting Maria Grazia Chiuri, creative director of women’s haute couture, ready-to-wear and accessories for Dior, her attitude toward fashion was that it is “inherently oppressive to women.”
“I had no experience with fashion. I didn’t care about fashion, I only cared about making art,” Chicago added.
“In the 1980s when I was touring, I had a fashion designer from Los Angeles on the board of the small nonprofit that sponsored the grassroots tour. She would send me clothes for the opening and one day I opened the box and had this beautiful crochet top in it, and it said $1,200. You have to realize I never spent more than $400 for a dress some years later and that was my wedding dress,” recalled Chicago on her early encounter with designer fashion.
Many years later, Chiuri reminded Chicago how important fashion can be for a feminist like herself. The two would eventually collaborate on The Female Divine project, an immersive work for the brand’s spring 2020 couture show. Chicago has also designed bags and plates for Dior and is currently working on another design project for the house that will be revealed later this year.
“In one of my early conversations with her, Maria Grazia said to me ‘Fashion is about the female body,’ something that I haven’t thought about. What came to my mind is that feminist art started with a battle around the female body, reclaiming the female body, from centuries of the male gaze, which fetishized it, diminished it, used it, and exploited it. My generation of artists began to change that,” she said.
“I think people don’t understand the importance of her being the first female creative director of Dior, not only that she’s made the platform for feminist art and women photographers with a new view of the female body. But also, Dior has a huge reach, which I learned from ‘The Female Divine’ project.…When they sent me the press book, it was 1,000 pages long, which meant Dior brought my work and my vision to people all over the world,” added Chicago.
At the center of the retrospective, which opens to the public on Thursday and runs until Sept. 1 with Dior being the headline sponsor, is an unpublished manuscript, called “Revelations,” a creation myth told from a woman’s point of view — full of drawings and writings that she’d made while formulating ideas for “The Dinner Party” — that had been stuck in a drawer at Chicago’s home in New Mexico for 50 years.
When she showed Hans Ulrich Obrist, the curator and artistic director of the Serpentine Galleries, he was hooked and decided that it prefigured Chicago’s entire body of work, and he would build the Serpentine show — the first interdisciplinary exhibition in London of Chicago’s work — around it.
“We met about 10 years ago when we did this marathon festival where we bring together artists from all different disciplines under the topic of transformation. She participated in that and that was the beginning of a dialogue,” recalled Obrist. “We begin with this idea about what artists want to do. It is more than an exhibition, we help them to realize an unrealized project.
“Judy said she had a new topic, but it had just been realized by Dior, which is a very big inflatable sculpture. I visited her again and I said: ‘There must be something else.’ I just kept asking that same question again and again, and all of a sudden, she remembered that there was this incredible manuscript. She managed to finish it right before the show starts,” said Obrist, adding that the Chicago exhibition is a key part of the art institute’s summer program, which also includes a Yinka Shonibare solo exhibition at Serpentine South and the upcoming reveal of the new Serpentine Pavilion designed by Seoul-based Korean architect Minsuk Cho.
Compliments for the artist continued at dinner, held at the Magazine Café, adjacent to the gallery space inside Hyde Park.
“They really shake you up. They have a very strong offense, sort of visceral. I really enjoy that. I was at the [Dior haute couture spring 2020] show when Judy did the set. That was beautiful,“ said Kristin Scott Thomas, who was seated at one of the long dinner tables festooned with candles and flowers arranged in a scarlet and purple ombre.
On top of modeling for Miu Miu’s fall 2024 show in Paris, Scott Thomas is working on the fifth season of the Apple TV+ drama “Slow Horses.” She plays Diana Taverner, the deputy director general of MI5 in the spy thriller, based on the “Slough House” series of novels by Mick Herron.
Other dinner guests included Kelly Rutherford, Bianca Jagger, Bel Powley, Zawe Ashton, Jing Lusi, Claire Gorlani and Keeley Hawes — who played Prince Andrew’s private secretary Amanda Thirsk in the Netflix hit biographical drama “Scoop” about that famous BBC Newsnight interview that brought down the disgraced royal over his link to Jeffrey Epstein — as well as representatives from the Royal Ballet, the Victoria & Albert Museum, and the Tate.
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