Paris (AFP)

Wearing a straw hat, the Dior woman throws the earth in espadrilles in the middle of the trees of a garden designed for the parade ready-to-wear Tuesday in Paris and will be replanted.

Demonstrated feminist, Maria Grazia Chiuri, Italian artistic director of the French house, dedicates this collection to the strong environmental message to Catherine Dior. Sister of the great couturier, heroine of the resistance tortured by the Gestapo and deported, she made career in the flowers after the war like wholesaler with the Halles of Paris.

In the front row, actresses Jennifer Lawrence and Monica Bellucci with her new short square haircut, model Karlie Kloss and star influence Chiara Ferragni came to admire this "modern gardener, a contemporary version of Catherine Dior".

Many models wore two braids, like Greta Thunberg, a Swedish climate activist and idol of young ecologists.

- Miss Dior -

"Catherine was not forgotten, but she was mostly described as a muse of Mr. Dior, less like a personality (...) She took care of the garden to somehow forget the horror she lived during the Second World War, "said Maria Grazia Chiuri.

To pay homage to Miss Dior, this independent woman, rather known for having given the name of the first perfume of the house and to reflect on the role of the garden which goes beyond a decoration, is an "other way of telling the inheritance Christian Dior "today, says the designer.

Long strapless raffia dress, embroidered espadrilles, short jacquard combinations and ensembles of wild silk reinvented with cut thread worn over a classic blue shirt, bleached jeans as sun-bleached, slightly rounded stone earrings in irregular shape: the pieces of crude appearance hides the refinement that distinguishes the house.

Some dresses are made of fabric on which an Italian artist applies the flowers to the textile so that they leave their colors and their forms. A technique that allows to obtain a very natural and delicate print, never the same.

"Today, everyone is obsessed and wants all the pieces to be the same, it's an industrial idea, but we were so fascinated that we said, ok, we can take risks," says Maria Grazia Chiuri.

The hats designed by the British Stephen Jones are inspired by a recently found picture of a Christian Dior hat that Catherine offered him.

"These hats are somehow like the UN, part of the straw comes from Italy, the other from the Philippines, a third from France," he told AFP.

- "We take, we throw, it's over" -

Designed in collaboration with the contemporary landscape workshop Coloco, the parade is designed as a garden populated with 160 trees from different nurseries in France, Germany and Italy which will be replanted in several spaces in Paris.

"We have to find solutions to the questions the world is asking us: Man and nature, we must find a way to live together," said Maria Grazia Chiuri. "We consider the garden as something that man can control, the idea was to recreate a natural garden, something spontaneous".

For her, creativity, as she learned in school, is not enough if we are not eco-responsible.

"There is a huge media echo around a fashion show and we really wanted to work with Maria Grazia to think about how to use it to make everyone aware that things have to be done," he said. AFP Nicolas Bonnenfant of Coloco.

"The trees are symbolic, as is the recycling of the whole set, and the parenthesis of the years we took and threw was finished," he concluded.

© 2019 AFP