Following their inaugural collaboration last year, luxury fashion house Dior has once again collaborated with artist and architect Philippe Starck. The twain French icons continue their collaboration with a complete collection of timelessly elegant furniture stemming from Christian Dior’s seminal Medallion Chair.
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“The architecture of a dress isn’t an empty term,” explained Christian Dior at a Conference at the Sorbonne in 1955. “A dress is constructed and it is constructed according to the direction of the fabrics, this is the secret of sewing and it is a secret that depends on the first architectural law: that of obedience to gravity. The way a fabric falls – and the line, the balance of a dress result from this fall – is a function of the direction of the fabric.”
Serving as a homage to Christian Dior, this collaborative collection sees Philippe Starck take the founder’s concept to heart — with the resultant furniture embodying the essence of couture itself. Building off the Miss Dior chair introduced in the last collaboration between Dior and Starck, the collection introduces two new forms.
“After Miss Dior, it was natural to expand the family,” says Starck. “The duo of creations, the Miss Dior Sweet chair and the Monsieur Dior armchair, are perfectly balanced through these essential, existential notions of gravity and lightness, of yin and yang. Miss Dior and Monsieur Dior, Catherine and Christian Dior, the sister and the brother, the chair and the armchair, is the story of a sublime complementary duality.”
The collaboration sees the much-iterated Medallion Chair get a minimalist makeover courtesy of Starck. Refined and pared down to its essential form, the Medallion Chair — and the duo of chairs it begets — is imbued with Starck’s industrialist heritage and places emphasis on craftsmanship and materiality. Based on Starck’s passion for the minimum, the seat of the chair has been distilled to the extreme, contributing to a strikingly — and perhaps somewhat fittingly — stark silhouette.
Utilising Italian craftsmanship, the chairs are available in an array of materials and hues, including polished or lacquered aluminium, ecru bouclé fabric and pink, black or fluorescent orange toile de Jouy. “Aluminium is the point zero from which everything is built, the idea of intelligence and purity of technology,” notes Starck. “The object as it is in its origin, its essence, without any dross.” The Miss Dior Sweet chair and Monsieur Dior armchair are complemented by “little brothers and sisters” such as stools and tables of varying sizes.
Displayed as works of art, Philippe Starck’s sophisticated and contemporary takes on the Dior Medallion Chair can be found at the Palazzo Citterio in Milan from the 18th to the 23rd of April. The Dior by Starck collection will be available for purchase from select Dior boutiques and via the Dior webstore from 2024 onwards.
Words by T. Angel
