BEIJING - Luxury brand Dior has become the latest company to apologize to China over a perceived insult to national sovereignty, saying Thursday it "cherishes the feelings of the Chinese people."
The French luxury brand found itself in hot water after using a map of China which did not include Taiwan, a self-ruled island which Beijing views as part of its territory awaiting reunification.
The scandal broke after a student posted an anonymous video to the Chinese social media app Weibo, purporting to show a presentation Wednesday at Zhejiang Gongshang University, in eastern China.
In the video a presenter from Dior displays a map without the island of Taiwan marked, which quickly drew criticism online and prompted Dior to deny that it represented the brand's position.
"Dior always respects and maintains the principle of One China, strictly upholds China's sovereignty and territorial integrity, and cherishes the feelings of the Chinese people," the French brand said in a statement.
"The company has started to investigate seriously and promised to deal with it severely," Dior's statement read.
By Thursday afternoon, the hashtag "Dior apologizes" had more than 250 million views.
China reacts strongly to any brand that appears to insult its territorial sovereignty.
"Haven't we talked about this many times this year? It's definitely intentional," one netizen posted on Weibo.
A number of companies and international airlines have edited their websites to refer to the democratic island of Taiwan as "Taiwan, China" or "Chinese Taipei."
Hotel chain Marriott's website in China was shut down by authorities for a week in 2018 after a customer questionnaire listed Taiwan, Tibet and Hong Kong as separate countries, prompting the hotel chain to apologize and change the wording.
Brands that appear to support the unrest in Hong Kong have also faced consumer ire, including the territory's flagship carrier Cathay.
Jewellery brand Tiffany removed an advert showing a woman covering one eye earlier this month, after Chinese consumers accused the company of supporting protesters by referencing a well known injury.
source: news.abs-cbn.com
PARIS - Kim Jones played with time on Friday in his simultaneously classic and dystopian collaboration with Daniel Arsham, filling Christian Dior's latest menswear collection with tonal, feminine-inspired pieces with a modern edge.
The house's Summer 2020 collection linked Dior's history as the industry's salient interpreter of femininity with the French house's daring, gender-bending future by way of draped sashes and floral pins off-set with ultra-modern, sometimes tattered accessories and textures.
Amid a pink and white set, the models became explorers in a eerie, beautiful wasteland at the show during Men's Fashion Week here.
They trekked through a sea of gradient pink sand around colossal, plaster letters spelling out Dior. Each letter had a ruined aspect about it, as if the sand and wind had worn it down for millennia.
Singer Lily Allen, model Kate Moss, her daughter Lila, and Louis Vuitton menswear creative director Virgil Abloh figured among the stars present for the exploration of Dior through the ages.
The idea of relics took center stage, a favorite subject for collaborator and category-defying artist Arsham.
Known for conceptually-driven sculptures, Arsham has collaborated with Dior before, working on window installations in some of their biggest stores and stylized fitting rooms in the Los Angeles Dior Homme store for then creative director Hedi Slimane.
Beyond the sculptural element of the set and the pink-sand runway, the collection, a highlight of Paris's fashion week, too, evoked sculptural origins while simultaneously embracing long, summery, slim-cut menswear.
The models donned pieces as diverse as multi-piece suits, mesh tops, re-interpreted trenches, jumpsuits in toile and adventure-ready looks for a dystopian traveler featuring fabric draped around their necks and faces, caps and wide glasses.
The intricately designed and intellectually driven show reaffirmed parent group LVMH's effort to invest more in men's fashion on and off the runway.
Studded with jewelry and bags, the show confirms Dior's push for more accessories in menswear - items that bring in the most money for the house.
Jones' collection featured Dior's first-ever collaboration with luxury luggage brand Rimowa, giving the collection futuristic, metal handbags, clutches and backpacks.
More traditionally cut suits were accented with feminine handbags or saddle bags. The clean lines and supple cuts were punctuated by threadbare, frayed hats and other accessories.
After the show's finale, Jones appeared on stage for no more than 5 seconds.
The enigmatic designer came on board as creative director in March last year, striking the fashion world off-the-bat with a first collection that attracted the most celebrity-heavy front row in the brand's history.
Before, as head of Louis Vuitton men, he brought streetwear to the world of high fashion and then reinvigorated the art of tailoring for a more modern audience.
source: news.abs-cbn.com
PARIS - Italian designer Maria Grazia Chiuri took Christian Dior to the circus Monday with arguably her most sublime collection for the Paris haute couture label.
A troupe of all-female acrobats of all body shapes led out the show inside a retro big top -- complete with harlequin-pattern floor -- built in the gardens of the Rodin Museum in the centre of the French capital.
Chiuri is the first woman ever to lead the mythic French label, and her feminism is never far away.
All her nearly 70 models wore glittery skullcaps fastened under their chins -- think aviation pioneer Amelia Earhart meets commedia dell'arte character Pierrot.
But there was nothing remotely clownish about the muted elegance of the clothes, featuring lashings of embroidery and beadwork, to summon up the spirit of the circus-set 1917 ballet "Parade".
That legendary show pooled the talents of Pablo Picasso -- who did the sets and costumes -- the composer Erik Satie, writer Jean Cocteau and Sergei Diaghilev and his Ballets Russes.
Chiuri's designs mixed the romantic and the muscular, cutting her dreamy organza and tulle dresses with whip smart ringmaster and lion tamer jackets, leather corsets and high-wire jumpsuits.
"Every look has its own personality, just like circus characters," she told AFP, "brave, funny, happy and sad."
"The circus is a world of its own, which passes from town to town, changing each one a little as it goes -- a bit like fashion week," the creator added.
TATTOOED LADY
The tattooed lady, that staple of the Victorian sideshow, also got a drum roll with a look inspired by Maud Wagner, America's first known female tattoo artist.
The designer, who sports a few herself, floated surrealist neck tattoos in a previous show.
Critics predicted her silk bandage roll gowns and architectural tutus would also be a hit with haute couture's super-rich clientele, the only people who can afford the handmade creations which are shown only in Paris.
Chiuri said she took her powdery palette from the stage curtain Picasso painted for "Parade", with bolder colors almost having to fight their way through what she called the "fine dust that sprinkles stage clothes".
The designer has put her unabashed feminism at the core of the brand since she took the reins at Dior in 2016.
Previous shows have involved collaborations with women writers, musicians and choreographers.
This time she worked with the female-led British acrobat company Mimbre.
Chiuri said she was struck by how inclusive the circus world was, and how it offered "a possible equality... where beauty, origin, gender and age are no longer important. Only technique and daring matter."
It was this that inspired the collection's necklaces and bracelets of interlocking gold hands. An acrobat "puts their life in the hands of another, you have to really trust each other", she said.
Feminism was the big theme of the day on the Paris catwalks, with Italian actress and #MeToo campaigner Asia Argento taking a starring role in her Roman neighbor Antonio Grimaldi's spring/summer collection.
She wore an asymmetrically cut white sleeveless dress adorned with ostrich feathers designed to show off her tattoos as a cheeky take on the wedding dresses that traditionally close couture shows.
While the Italian designer praised her courage and "unconventional spirit", Argento told AFP that she "loved his sculptural couture".
Few designers anywhere, however, can match the sculptural verve of the Dutch Iris Van Herpen, whose gravity-defying creations were the fruit of collaboration with New York artist and former NASA engineer Kim Keever.
source: news.abs-cbn.com
PARIS -- Dior came out with all feminist guns blazing at Paris fashion week Tuesday seeking to catch the spirit of #MeToo and the new wave of female empowerment.
Designer Maria Grazia Chiuri, who began her reign at the French couture house with the now cult $680 T-shirt, "We Should All be Feminists", summoned up the spirit of 1968, the year when social and sexual revolutions swept the planet.
Chiuri's muse, British model and women's rights advocate Ruth Bell, led the line with a black and white woollen jumper declaring, "Non, non, non et non!"
"It is not bad to say 'No! No! No!' sometimes," the designer told AFP after the show, "Feminism means freedom, freedom to dress how you want, to define yourself."
To the thumping "Ooh, I just know that something good is gonna happen" refrain to Kate Bush's classic song "Cloudbusting", the Italian sent out a hippy and Beatnik-inspired autumn-winter collection, declaring that "changing the world also means changing clothes".
"Women's Rights Are Human Rights" slogans burst from the walls of the set which was papered with 1968 Vogue magazine covers, with Chiuri picking up on a "fun" demonstration women activists staged outside Dior's boutique in London two years earlier.
'Mini skirt protest'
The "British Society for the Protection of Mini Skirts" picketed the shop after Dior failed to include a single mini skirt in its collection that year.
The protest prompted its then designer Marc Bolan to cave in and create the younger more "with it" Miss Dior line.
Chiuri said she was struck how the "Youthquake" that legendary US Vogue editor Diana Vreeland wrote about in the late 1960s mirrored our times.
"She wrote that there is a new generation who are changing our view about sexuality about women and about men. In some ways (what is happening) now is another moment like this," the designer added.
And she credits sparring with her own 21-year-old daughter, Rachele Regini -- who she jokingly calls "Miss No" -- with helping to sharpen her view. "The younger generation are posing us a lot of questions," she said.
With actresses Cara Delevingne and Isabelle Huppert in the front row, Chiuri went on a magical mystery tour of late 1960s radical chic.
Having helped bring the beret back into vogue by having all her models wear one at her last autumn-winter show, this time Chiuri did the same for another piece of classic French headgear, the gavroche cap.
But the core of the collection was a line of sumptuous patchwork coats, skirts, trousers, dresses and boots inspired by her southern Italian grandmother.
Another of Chiuri's favourite models, the British activist Adwoa Aboah, closed the show in a wool-embroidered organza dress.
Chiuri said she shortened her kilts and dresses but none of them could really be called a mini-skirt, and her line of hippy-dippy scarf dresses all dipped below the knee.
Saint Laurent's killer vamps
Saint Laurent's Anthony Vaccarello, on the other hand, loves the leggy look. Despite the freezing Paris temperatures his female models wore the merest of black leather mini-skirts, shorts and dresses at his outdoor show opposite the Eiffel Tower -- although some at least got to wear shin-high fur-topped boots.
The men in his co-ed show were more fortunate, with several wearing coats, as the Belgian sent a procession of chilly ultra-sexy black-clad killer vamps down the runway, some in broad-brimmed fedora hats.
Vaccarello leavened his rainbow of black at the end with a line of short shoulder-padded floral pattern dresses on a black base.
Earlier, young French designer Marine Serre made her Paris fashion week debut with her "FutureWear" show, mixing sportswear and vintage, and also a line of hippish scarf dresses.
Her occasional skin-hugging head-coverings also stood out, conjuring up images of divers, or with her crescent moon logo, luge-riding Muslim women at the Winter Olympics.
Like Dior, which featured a number of check suits, young French label Jour/ne mixed richly coloured velvets and tartans, giving a highly wearable twist to vaguely vintage male silhouettes.
source: news.abs-cbn.com
Not all women can be models, Dior designer Maria Grazia Chiuri said Tuesday after a show inspired by the feminist artist Niki de Saint Phalle, who is famous for her fat ladies.
The Italian designer, who has made much of her own feminist credentials since becoming the first woman to head the storied French label last year, led out her spring-summer collection at Paris Fashion Week with a Breton jumper bearing the slogan, "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?"
The ironic rallying call kicked off Chiuri's most colorful show for Dior, which fizzed with Saint Phalle's primary colors and licorice pinks and yellows.
But the designer stopped short of casting larger models in her homage to the great Franco-American artist who glorified the fuller female form in her voluptuous "Nanas" sculptures.
"Not all girls can be a model," Chiuri told AFP as she praised a new charter banning ultra-thin models from the Paris catwalk.
"I think it's a great idea... because I'm a woman, I have a daughter.
"At the same time we have to explain that not all people can be a model," she added.
- 'It's a job' -
Chiuri's comments came only two weeks after a wave of "plus-size" models led by Ashley Graham made headlines at New York Fashion Week.
"Because sometimes now everybody wants it all. If you want to be a singer you have to have a voice. If you want to be a climber you have to be athletic. There is something that is specific," Chiuri said.
The public often have the wrong idea about designers, she argued. "I don't want to use anorexic girls. Sometimes people forget that it's a job."
"We work on a Stockman dummy. It is size 37. We don't work on 40 because it is too difficult afterwards to make the other sizes. So there are some sizes that are good for making the first prototype. So we need the girls who have the talent and are naturally born in this size."
Earlier in the day the young French brand Jour/ne used a plus-sized model in its Paris catwalk show, although it preferred to call her "someone with curves".
"We don't want to pigeon-hole models," a source at the label told AFP after the show, which raised eyebrows by using Coca-Cola branding on some of its clothes.
Chiuri said she loved models "that have personality. I love (the British model) Ruth (Bell) because she has a strong personality. I think that you can feel it."
The designer created a huge and spectacular cave with mirrored mosaics to show Dior's collection in a nod to similar instalments that Saint Phalle created in Hamburg and Italy.
- 'We should all be feminists' -
Chiuri began her reign at Dior with a t-shirt bearing the slogan "We should all be feminists", and borrowed the "great women artists" line in her new show from an essay by the American feminist art historian Linda Nochlin.
The size of models has become a hot-button issue, with many critics claiming that fashion presents young women with an unhealthy and unattainable ideal of beauty.
Plus-size model Ashley Graham received a rapturous reception when she stepped out for Canadian lingerie brand Addition Elle in New York, and larger models Candice Huffine, Precious Lee and Sabina Karlsson also featured in other top shows.
Earlier this month French fashion's two biggest players -- LVMH and Kering -- said they were banning overly thin and under-age models from their catwalks.
Models must now be at least 16 years of age and size 34 or over (size six in Britain and zero in the US).
Saint Laurent -- which is owned by Kering -- will unveil its spring-summer collection later Tuesday, having been criticized earlier this year by French advertising watchdogs for its use of very thin models in "porno chic" poses for a publicity campaign.
source: news.abs-cbn.com
