The Benaki Museum is delighted to announce its collaboration with the House of Dior on the Dior Cruise 2022 collection, held on Thursday, June 17th, at the Panathenaic Stadium in Athens.
The vision of Maria Grazia Chiuri, Creative Director of Dior women’s collections, was to stage an international celebration of savoir-faire and cross-cultural dialogues in the Greek capital.
The House of Dior wished to highlight, through a series of artistic exchanges, the creative legacy of artists and traditional craftsmen in Greece today. NE.M.A. Passementerie since 2012 operates as a branch of the Benaki Museum, safeguarding the preservation, promotion and utilization of traditional silk weaving techniques, an approach that resonated with Dior.
Maria Grazia Chiuri paid a visit to the traditional passementerie workshop, which led to the commissioning of the decorative elements for the show’s hats, which were produced by Atelier Tsalavoutas, a family-run Greek atelier specializing in traditional naval flat caps. Specifically, NE.M.A. undertook the production of the twisted handmade cords adorning the sailor caps of the Cruise 2022 collection.
Guided by NE.M.A.’s director, ethnologist Virginia Matseli, a number of accessories were created for the hats, under the supervision of Stephen Jones, who has been the Creative Director of hats at Christian Dior for 25 years. After a tour of the production site, the legendary British milliner expressed his desire to do other collaborations with NE.M.A.
The House of Dior filmed the entire production process as well as the interviews with the weavers at NE.M.A., under the direction of Marianna Economou, with photography by Myrto Papadopoulos.
