At Christian Dior’s spring 2020 haute couture show in Paris today, attendees were ushered inside an enormous womblike chamber, with a curved mauve ceiling and soft lilac carpeting. The space was part of a 225-foot-long and 45-foot-high inflatable anthropomorphic sculpture, installed in the gardens of the Musée Rodin, by the pioneering American artist Judy Chicago. The 80-year-old first designed the structure, which represents a goddess figure with round feminine forms, in the late 1970s, though it was never realized in three dimensions. The work, titled “The Female Divine,” served as the show venue and also contained 21 vividly colored, hand-appliquéd and embroidered velvet banners that lined the runway. “But the issue of changing attitudes toward women and imagining ‘the female divine’ is something that hasn’t happened yet, has it?”

Source: New York Times January 20, 2020 22:07 UTC