Maison Dior held its first show on the African continent at the foot of Egypt’s ancient Giza pyramids, presenting its 2023 fall men’s collection in the shadow of the millennia-old monuments.
Egypt has resently hosted COP top meeting, in the Red Sea resort town of Sharm El-Sheikh. This is the second COP in Africa since COP22 was held in Morocco in 2016. Now it is time for another international happening in the country hosted by French luxury fashion house controlled and chaired by French businessman Bernard Arnault, who also heads LVMH, the world's largest luxury group.
Fashion giant Christian Dior is famous for its designer clothing and is part of LVMH’s highly profitable Fashion and Leather Goods group.20 The brand was founded in 1946 by its namesake founder.
Arnault’s investment in Christian Dior predates the existence of LVMH as it currently stands. Arnault purchased Parisian textile group Boussac, in bankruptcy protection, in 1984 for a symbolic one franc.
Boussac’s assets included Christian Dior. The Dior brand has proven a staple of Arnault’s holdings—and, in turn, LVMH’s business—ever since. In 2017, LVMH and Arnault proposed a complex $13.1 billion transaction to consolidate the company’s ownership of Dior by buying out minority shareholders.
Dwarfed by the vast Giza-pyramids complex—their imposing ridges illuminated by white light for the show — models showcased the collection titled “Celestial”.
A fall collection that revealed itself in the scorched Giza desert at nightfall was textbook Kim Jones: vast, elegant, cinematic. The monuments of ancient pharaohs lit up, by LEDs illuminating the runway into existence to the sound of pounding techno. Jones is an auteur as much as he is a designer, pulling from both the Dior archive and the world beyond it to create pure spectacle. The man knows how to put on a show. Lucky VVIP residents and international guests listed on the guestlist, gathered to the venue near Cairo for an extravagant programme. Dior's tradition of showcasing its menswear collections around the world, comes to the Pyramids of Giza in Cairo, after previous Dior shows in Spain, China, Greece, Italy, South Korea, the UK, and the US.
Zeinab Bashier, the Founder and President of “We love Egypt“ Foundation, the main target of foundation is to focus on the development in all aspects in Egypt and highlight it locally and internationally.
Under the stars and before the silent wonder of the pyramids, it all felt a little mystical. That’s kinda the point. As both a Fall collection premiere and a birthday party for Dior’s 75th, Jones wants the celebration to be spiritual, to focus on the cosmos—much like the ancient Egyptians, who built the show’s breathtaking backdrop to reflect the star path of Orion’s Belt above.
“With this anniversary and the collections’ we’ve done that are all entwined and building to a conclusion, it felt appropriate to do something very special at the end of the year,” Jones told GQ ahead of the show. “It is the summing up of past, present and future in a place—in front of the Great Pyramid.”
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