Dior Haute Couture SS 23 Collection: 10 Key Looks you have to see

Dresses that glide over the body and caress it: this is the new Dior Haute Couture SS 23 collection that gets all quiet in a noisy world.

For Maria Grazia Chiuri, every Haute Couture collection is an exploration of the imaginative complexity of a dress built for a body. The couture dress is a prosthesis that becomes a body.

A body-garment. A body-home. A body-manifesto

Dresses that glide over the body and caress it. They are in silk, they are in velvet, many with that crumpled, syncopated rhythm effect that makes the fabric come alive. Trousers are as loose as georgette tunics. The embroideries are minute. Tiny silver studs, tiny sequins, become stretches that absorb the stage lights to reflect them on the audience. Sloping fringes in silver and gold accompany and enhance the choreography of the body movements. The suits, the coats are in the masculine fabrics dear to Monsieur Dior. The lengths, always above the ankle, reveal shoes with a prominent heel and base.

Joséphine Baker - an African-American singer and dancer who arrived from America in the mid-1920s in cosmopolitan and worldly Paris, a destination and mirage for artists, writers, tailors, on the run or in search of something - leads this collection. A glamour icon, she embodies the modernity of those years, beyond stereotypes and prejudices in that mix of cultures and shared experiences that animated the frenetic and crazy world of the cabaret. A naturalised Frenchwoman, acclaimed in Europe, in the post-war period she walked the stages of the Strand Theater and Carnegie Hall in New York, wearing French fashion, including Dior, to claim charisma and success.

Set-up of the fashion show by the African-American artist Mickalene Thomas exalts those black or mixed-ethnicity female figures, such as Joséphine Baker, who have become role models, breaking racial barriers, going against the tide, and reveals the deeper meaning of this collection. It changes the perspective of couture garments, the essence of fashion that can become a radical gesture of awareness of one's own value, one's own strength.