Watch: The Making of Dior's Costumes for the Nuit Blanche Ballet
Dior's Maria Grazia Chiuri has officially come full circle, going from designing a collection inspired by dancers, to creating costumes for them. The dancers in question are the performers of the Nuit Blanche ballet, a tribute to the acclaimed composer Philip Glass that is being staged at Rome's Teatro Dell'Opera.
For the task, Chiuri collaborated with the Opera's Director of Ballet, Eleonora Abbagnato, and its ateliers to create a wardrobe of 16 ethereal ballet costumes, including skirts and bodysuits. As we've already seen from her collections for Dior, the Italian designer's romantic touch was unmistakable: the designs featured delicate, hand-sewn silk flowers, suspended between diaphanous layers of tulle and point d’esprit. The inspiration behind them? Pressed flowers wedged between the pages of a book. How dreamy.
As dreamy as they look, however, those designs took a lot of work — 3,200 hours in total. All 1,500 flowers, specially created at the Fusion Art atelier in Bologna, were worth 180 hours of work alone. Dior's haute couture mastery certainly came into play with the creation of each costume, as you'll discover (and appreciate) in the exclusive video below:
Nuit Blanche is now showing at the Teatro dell'Opera di Roma til 2 April 2019. For more information, visit www.operaroma.it.
