Cultural appropriation is a touchpaper issue in the fashion industry, but the house’s bombastically showbiz event in Morocco also highlighted local cultures
The name of Marrakech’s most beautiful ruin, the El Badi palace, means “the incomparable”. Built in the Moroccan city by the 16th century sultan Ahmad al-Mansur, the majestic ramparts long ago crumbled to a dusty pink pie crust around a 90-metre stretch of glass-still water bisecting the vast courtyard. Paths are traced over sunken gardens, so that the oranges grow level with your feet as you walk.
“The incomparable” is an appropriate name, too, for Common Ground, the fashion show held there on Monday by Christian Dior. Taking place at dusk, lit by candles floating in the water, stone benches plumped with cushions especially embroidered by a local collective of female weavers, it was a jawdroppingly ambitious event, even by the standards of the ever-showboating luxury industry. As well as being bombastically showbiz – the aftershow entertainment was Diana Ross – this was also, as Dior’s creative director Maria Grazia Chiuri put it the day before, “an intellectual reflection on fashion”, which addressed the industry’s red-button issue of cultural appropriation.
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