Brigitte Niedermair Eyes Dior Resort 2020 North Africa-Inspired Collection

Models Adesuwa Aighewi, Ana Barbosa, Jiali Zhao and Ruth Bell are styled by Isabelle Kountoure in Dior Cruise 2020 Collection. Regular Dior photographer Brigitte Niedermair captures Maria Grazia’s homage to North Africa in a collection about luxury, globalism and culture.

The toile du jouy fabrics were produced as wax prints by studio Uniwax, located in the Ivory Coast city of Abidjan. Months before the collection debut in Marrakech, Maria Grazia packed by her toiles of seasons past—with her jungle creatures, wacky flora, and tarot card allusions, writes Vogue.com — and print their “gloriously and intentionally imperfect, labor intensive” interpretations.

Uniwax was only one of five significant collaborations in this Resort outing. A Moroccan women’s textile and ceramics association called Sumano created the more tapestry-like woven pieces in the collection, including the fringed coat of Look 1. The American artist Mickalene Thomas and the Jamaican-British designer Grace Wales Bonner each provided their own interpretation of the New Look: Thomas’s featured a Bar jacket entirely beaded on the back in one her collaged prints, while Wales Bonner augmented her precision tailoring with raffia embroideries. A designer from the Ivory Coast named Monsieur Pathé’O, who was known for making Nelson Mandela’s shirts, designed a look for the collection featuring the late ANC leader’s face on the back. And Stephen Jones collaborated with a Ghanaian-British milliner named Martine Henry on the head wraps or turbans of unspecific ethnic origin. Everything was about the joys of collaboration and a kind of polyglot, artisanal reverie. There were dresses encrusted with Murano glass beads, because those very beads originated in Venice but found their way to Africa. There were interpretations of the Uniwax toiles in double-face cashmere and silk jacquard, so in other words, African prints reworked by small European mills.