These innovative Dior shoes bridge the past, present and future
Inspired by an ornate 1962 Dior pump, Maria Grazia Chiuri’s 62-22 shoes have just released a futuristic take on the classic design. Watch how they are made in this special short film
Maria Grazia Chiuri’s tenure as creative director of Dior has shown her to be an avid student of the house’s archives – and, indeed, of Christian Dior himself, whose fixations and obsessions have been refracted to through the contemporary and resolutely feminist lens of the Italian designer.
For its A/W 2022 collection, Chiuri fused riffs on the historic silhouettes synonymous with the house – a version of Christian Dior’s 1947 “Bar Jacket” turned inside out, its padding exposed, for example – with a decidedly futuristic. The garments were installed with luminous wire tubes or covered with technical corsets and vests created in collaboration with the Italian start-up D-Air Lab, the Dynamic Autonomy and Intelligent Robotics Lab (these innovations included airbag technology and temperature control elements). Dior described the collection as “suspended” between past, present and future.
Past, present, future: Dior’s ’62-22′ shoes
The know-how behind Dior’s 62-22 shoes. Photography by Andrea Cenetiempo
Such juxtapositions extended to footwear, which saw Chiuri turn to the embellished shoes that Roger Vivier designed for the house in the early 1960s (in an early act of fashion collaboration, Vivier worked with Christian Dior for nearly of a decade, meeting the creator in 1953). The particular pair that Chiuri referenced to create the just-released ’62-22′ shoe – its name refers to the year the original shoe was created, 1962 – stand out for their intricate stitching and heel ‘ comma’ curved (“The innovative heel treatment adds tension and even a sense of disbelief to his designs,” says the Met Museum’s Costume Institute of a similar 1961 pair in its collection).
Here, the mid-century elegance of the original design is updated with an overlay strap in ultralight engineered neoprene, which wraps around the ankle and is secured with a D-Air Lab research-inspired no-slip closure. The fluorescent yellow stitching, according to the house, is inspired by the “motorcycle world”. With the various traditional embroideries – from mimosa flowers to the coral motif via sewn blue stones – the ’62-22′ is an ode to Parisian know-how, traditional and futuristic at the same time.
See how Dior’s 62-22 shoes are made in Mélinda Triana’s short film below. §
