Dior Talks

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[Feminism] Robin Morgan, the poet, author & a key figure in the American women’s movement, talks time, progress and her extraordinary career Mar 18, 2021

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Welcome to ‘Feminism’, the new series of ‘Dior Talks’ podcasts, hosted by Justine Picardie. ‘Dior Talks’ creates fascinating spaces for expression, exploring the imaginations and discourses of the artists and thinkers who influence Maria Grazia Chiuri. ‘Feminism’ engages in dialogue with the women who have inspired the Creative Director of Women’s collections and taken part in bold, empowering collaborations with the House. An exceptional roster of guests shares the magic of their thinking and the key moments of their careers with biographer and journalist Justine Picardie.

In this second episode, Picardie talks to Robin Morgan, a hugely influential feminist theorist and much-published writer and journalist. Morgan has been a key figure in the women’s movement, both in the USA and internationally, since the early 1960s, and was also an early participant in the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements of the time. She is widely considered a crucial figure in the development of modern feminism and has been forming international networks of like-minded campaigners throughout her adult life.

Robin Morgan was born in Florida in 1941, to a single woman who had come south to avoid the censure surrounding unmarried motherhood. She spent her early years as a child model and actor, appearing regularly in TV shows. However, her desire to write led her away from her mother’s ambitions for her acting career and towards a degree at Columbia University. She worked as a secretary for a literary agent after college and married poet Kenneth Pitchford in 1962, with whom she had a son, the musician Blake Morgan.

At this time, Morgan became active in various leftwing movements, writing for radical publications such as ‘Liberation’ and ‘The National Guardian’. She joined the Civil Rights Movement and in 1967 co-founded the New York Radical Women group. In 1970, she published her first anthology of theoretical texts, ‘Sisterhood is Powerful’. Concurrently publishing volumes of poetry and works of fiction, she received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1979 and has, to date, published 21 books of feminist theory, poetry and fiction and, including several years as editor-in-chief of Ms., has written for multiple newspapers and magazines in the USA and internationally. In 1984, she founded the Sisterhood is Global Institute with Simone de Beauvoir, and in 2005 co-founded the Women’s Media Center.

In this second episode of ‘Feminism’, Justine Picardie and Robin Morgan get right to the heart of the major concerns and challenges which have faced and continue to face feminist struggles internationally. Morgan reflects on the surprises and insights of having lived eight decades and recalls the injustices which women faced in their daily lives when she was young. They discuss the transition to post-feminism and the different approaches to women’s causes around the world. Morgan considers the ever-evolving relationship between feminism and the cultural left, and also the perennial hostility from the right. They also talk about Morgan and Maria Grazia Chiuri’s mutual admiration and budding friendship, and the unlikely but magical interaction of fashion and radical feminism which occurred when Chiuri chose to honor Morgan’s remarkable career at a special ceremony in February 2019 in Paris. Morgan has been a long-standing inspiration for the Creative Director of Women’s collections.

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[Feminism] Sharon Eyal, the singular dancer and choreographer, talks to Justine Picardie about her passions, inspirations and career Mar 11, 2021

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Here, Picardie talks to Sharon Eyal, the highly esteemed dancer and choreographer, who directs the L-E-V Company, the unconventional yet rigorous dance troupe she founded with performance curator Gai Behar. Trained in classical ballet, she swiftly developed her own uncompromised style early in her career. She has become known for an expansive range of reference, strongly defined aesthetics and complex choreography, has won numerous major awards for her work and performed with her company worldwide.

Sharon Eyal was born in Jerusalem, a self-described ‘hyperactive child’ until her parents signed her up for ballet lessons at the age of 4. From 1990 to 2008 she danced with the Batsheva Dance Company, founded by Martha Graham in 1964, and served as associate artistic director for the Batsheva Dancers Create program from 2005-12. Since its founding in 2013, L-E-V has been the arena for her profound, beguiling vision of choreography, with electronic music, fashion, contemporary art and club culture regular references. The company has performed at major venues such as the Joyce Theater, New York, and Sadler’s Wells, London, and international festivals including Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, Montpellier Danse and Julidans.

In this first episode of ‘Feminism’, Justine Picardie, a longtime fan, asks Eyal about her unrelenting passion for dance and movement as they discuss the central themes of freedom, physicality and flight, both corporeal and emotional. Despite its grueling realities, dance has been a release for Eyal and, intriguingly, a centering source of calm. She talks about the connection she formed with Maria Grazia Chiuri collaborating on the Spring-Summer 2019 show at which Eyal’s dancers gave a remarkable performance, an experience repeated in ‘Disturbing Beauty’, the film that presented the Autumn-Winter 2021-2022 collection. Eyal finds huge inspiration in Maria Grazia Chiuri’s designs and recognizes the importance of female movement, female expression and, most crucially, female liberation in the women’s collections.

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[Female gaze] The feminist art historian and critic discusses self-portraiture and photography as tools for female self-expression Oct 29, 2020

Show notes

Welcome to the 17th episode of the Dior Talks series ‘The Female Gaze’. With the term developed in response to the writings of feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey, this podcast series will explore how the work of the female photographers, directors and creatives collaborating with Dior offers a radically new and progressive image of women.

In this new episode, series host Charlotte Jansen, a British journalist and author, talks to Raffaella Perna, the highly-esteemed Italian art historian and theorist of feminist visual cultures. A prolific writer, Perna has been based in Rome for much of her career, maintaining her theoretical practice and teaching widely, including at the prestigious Sapienza University. She is also a curator, and last year co-curated with Marco Scotini the exhibition The Unexpected Subject: 1978 Art and Feminism in Italy at the FM Centro per l'Arte Contemporanea in Milan, sponsored by Dior.

Perna has a long and distinguished biography as a specialist in Italian feminist art, and the country’s feminist movements in general, most particular during the vital and energized years of the 1970s. She has a particular focus on self-portraiture and its ramifications for female creative agency. She first met Maria Grazia Chiuri in 2008, through feminist icon and artist Tomaso Binga, to whom Charlotte has also spoken as part of this series. The two immediately identified with each other through their mutual passions and concerns, and Perna was instantly struck at how unusual it was for Chiuri as a fashion designer to be so influenced, and so creatively driven, by the politics and conceptual concerns of the movement. She also recognized how influential fashion is, and how interesting it is to consider the potential for its impact as a vehicle for conversation and action.

Here, Charlotte Jansen chats with Raffaella Perna about her dedication to the individuals and trailblazers who have formed the very specific and challenging feminist movements in Italy. The ’70s marked an extraordinary time for women in the country, as a previously conservative and religious society in which women had always occupied a constricted role was exploding and expanding. Women were writing, teaching, making art and campaigning as never before, and Perna is in the unique position to both remember and contextualize it all. She describes the rich landscape of relationships and collaborations which constituted the world of Italian feminism at that time, and her role as a primary theorist and recorder enables her to offer meaningful, prescient comment on the contemporary situation in 2020.

Raffaella Perna is one of the only The Female Gaze guests who has not been either a photographer, director or artist herself, and Charlotte Jansen takes the opportunity to delve deeply into the founding principles and dreams of feminism, which has inspired and continues to inspire the work of the Creative Director of Dior women’s collections so profoundly.

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[Female gaze] Artist and photographer Viviane Sassen discusses the connections between fine art & fashion elements of her creative practice Oct 22, 2020

Show notes

Welcome to this 16th episode of the new Dior Talks series ‘The Female Gaze’. With the term developed in response to the writings of feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey, this podcast series will explore how the work of the female photographers and creatives collaborating with Dior offers a radically new and progressive image of women.

In this episode, series host Charlotte Jansen, a British journalist and author, speaks with the Dutch artist and photographer Viviane Sassen, whose highly prolific, category-defying career blurs the boundaries between fine art and fashion photography, and whose unique aesthetic led to a collaboration with Maria Grazia Chiuri to photograph the campaign for the cruise 2019 collection with Jennifer Lawrence. Her uniquely dream-like aesthetic originates partly from her early childhood experiences in Africa and also with her determinedly expansive approach to photography and insistence on viewing the image through varied metaphorical lenses.

Viviane Sassen was born in Amsterdam but spent some of her formative childhood years in Kenya, before her family moved back to the Netherlands in 1978. She studied design and photography and gained a Master’s in Fine Art from the prestigious Ateliers Arnhem. She has returned repeatedly to Kenya and other parts of Africa throughout her career and credits her early experiences in the region for her fascination with ideas of place, identity and anonymity and her use of ideas of memory, abstraction and surreality in her work. She has shown widely around the world, including exhibitions at MoMA, Les Rencontres d’Arles, Nederlands Fotomuseum and the Photographer’s Gallery in London. She was awarded the Dutch Prix de Rome in 2007 and many other awards internationally in recognition of her work.

In this week’s episode, Sassen discusses her life and the concept of time in the studio during lockdown and her relationship to the travel and movement which is inherent in her practice. She also speaks about her own viewpoint and her various subjects; how aspects of this gaze are constant and deeply personal, but also how her eye shifts and adapts according to the project she is working on, whether fine art photographs or her prolific output as a fashion photographer.

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[Female gaze] The photography rule-breaking fashion photographer discusses her career, aesthetic, and portraying women Oct 15, 2020

Show notes

Welcome to the 15th episode of the Dior Talks series ‘The Female Gaze’. With the term developed in response to the writings of feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey, this podcast series will explore how the work of the female photographers and creatives collaborating with Dior offers a radically new and progressive image of women.

In this episode, series host Charlotte Jansen, a British journalist and author, talks to Julia Hetta, the acclaimed Swedish fashion photographer who has carved out a distinct position in the industry for her highly choreographed, minutely constructed images for editorial, advertising and portraiture. She takes much inspiration from Old Master paintings, particularly the Dutch still life tradition, and brings a beguiling process of finely balanced composition to a world so often preoccupied with fast appeal.

Julia Hetta was born in Uppsala in 1972 and studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam in the early 2000s. As a child she was fascinated by photography and the darkroom which her father had constructed in the basement. She painted and drew, but realised that photography enabled her to realise her ideas of light and shadow with more immediacy and she embraced the development of black and white images. Later she worked for a photographer’s agency but was not concerned with assisting photographers directly, preferring to define her craft through the inspirations of photojournalism. Since starting to work in the fashion world, she has shot for Vogue Italia, British Vogue, AnOther Magazine, W Magazine, L’Uomo Vogue and Dazed & Confused, among many others, and has done campaigns for major labels. She has photographed myriad celebrities, most particularly prominent women, and was also commissioned to take birthday portraits of Queen Silvia of Sweden in 2013. In 2014, her work was included in the exhibition Stop Now: Fashion Photography Next, at Foam Museum in Amsterdam.

Here, Charlotte Jansen and Julia Hetta discuss her route to fashion photography and the inspirations she has drawn on in her dedicated study of chiaroscuro and the interplay of darkness and luminosity. She describes working around her innate shyness to form her craft, from her early pictures of her brother to her current work for industry majors. Their conversation veers from the simplicity of Swedish visuals to the writings of Toni Morrison, as they deconstruct Hetta’s complex yet crystalline approach to the representation of women in photography. Finally, Hetta describes her experience shooting the Spring-Summer 2018 haute couture collection for Dior Magazine, and the brave decision of Maria Grazia Chiuri, the Creative Director of Women’s collections, to only collaborate with women.

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[Female gaze] Mexican photographer Maya Goded discusses her exhaustively researched projects documenting the lives of women in her homeland. Oct 08, 2020

Show notes

Welcome to this 14th episode of the new Dior Talks series ‘The Female Gaze’. With the term developed in response to the writings of feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey, this podcast series will explore how the work of the female photographers and creatives collaborating with Dior offers a radically new and progressive image of women.

In this episode, series host Charlotte Jansen, a British journalist and author, speaks with Maya Goded from her home in Mexico City. Goded is no ordinary arbiter of the photographic form, spending years, sometimes decades, working on individual research projects and painstakingly building visual documents of women and womanhood from every stratum of Mexican society. From her sensitive and inquiring photographs of women’s precarious existence, to her subtly moving portrait of Maria Grazia Chiuri, she offers a thoughtful discussion of her working processes and her socially conscious approach to contemporary life.

Maya Goded was born in Mexico City in 1967 and currently resides in the beautiful Coyoacán neighborhood which is also home to Frida Kahlo’s Blue House (La Casa Azul). She assisted other photographers before embarking on her solo career, and her first major project was a three-year endeavor photographing Afro-Mexicans, titled Black Earth. She has consistently focused on themes of female sexuality, gender violence, prostitution and the traditional role of motherhood assigned to women in Mexican society. In 2001, she held a major solo exhibition at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, titled Sex Workers 1995-2000, which was hailed for its penetrating, refreshingly nuanced portrayal of its subjects. An unstinting commitment to listening and sensitive observation is the hallmark of Goded’s work, which has allowed her to reveal so many layers of women’s lives without cliché or condescension. Goded has received numerous prestigious awards for her work, including the Guggenheim Fellowship, the FotoPres La Caixa prize and the W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fund.

Here, Charlotte Jansen speaks to Maya Goded about the breadth of her practice and how she views the world at this extraordinary time. They discuss how lockdown has forced each of us into a reckoning with ourselves and our lives and how this year’s eerie silence has led to millions of personal examinations of the potential for change. They reminisce on Goded’s intimate portrait of Maria Grazia Chiuri and the brief, bonding time they spent together. They also reflect on the striking images Goded took of the Dior Cruise 2019 collection. Through her multifaceted and lovingly empathetic practice, Goded is an ideal figure to consider the question, what does it take to change the way we see a woman?

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[Female gaze] The director discusses the film she made for the Spring-Summer 2021 show and her relationship to feminism Oct 02, 2020

Show notes

Welcome to this 13th episode of the Dior Talks series ‘The Female Gaze’. With the term developed in response to the writings of feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey, this podcast series will explore how the work of the female photographers, directors and creatives collaborating with Dior offers a radically new and progressive image of women.

In this new episode, series host Charlotte Jansen, a British journalist and author, talks to Alina Marazzi, the Italian director commissioned by Creative Director of Women’s collections Maria Grazia Chiuri to create a short film to be unveiled before the Dior Spring-Summer 2021 show. Marazzi, who lives and works in Milan, has been an established name in the worlds of film and theatre direction for twenty years and is much respected for the focus on female subjectivity, motherhood and memory in her work. She has always been profoundly influenced by feminist theory, particularly – and coincidentally – by the work of Laura Mulvey.

Alina Marazzi was born in Milan in 1964. She lost her mother, the writer Luisa Marazzi Hoepli, in 1972 and this trauma informed Marazzi’s work later in life. She studied film in London in the 1980s, focusing on documentary and experimental film. Her first feature, ‘Un'ora sola ti vorrei’ (‘For One More Hour with You’), about her mother’s life, was released in 2002, and since then she has released numerous further films, both documentary and fictional, as well as directing theater and contemporary opera productions. She has won various international awards for her work and her films have been screened widely, from BBC4 in the UK to the Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland. In 2014, she was a visiting lecturer at Warwick University, and she is guest lecturer at the Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti in Milan.

Here, Charlotte Jansen and Alina Marazzi discuss the phone call she received from Maria Grazia Chiuri, inviting her to create the short film for the Spring-Summer 2021 show, and the access the project gave her to the archives of the iconic feminist artist Lucia Marcucci, who has been a great inspiration both to her and to Maria Grazia Chiuri. The film creates a tableau vivant of Marcucci’s groundbreaking legacy and acts as a moving intellectual basis for the collection, as it were one of the pillars of the collection’s conceptual manifesto. Marazzi discusses the foundational ideas of her films, the thinkers and critics who have helped to crystalize her own message. She contemplates the striking similarities and crossovers between her own and the Creative Director’s working methods and the meeting of minds they experienced, which formed the basis of this beautiful short.

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[Female gaze] Jodi Bieber, the South African photographer and World Press Photo of The Year winner discusses life, imagery and identity Sep 24, 2020

Show notes

Welcome to this 12th episode of the new Dior Talks series ‘The Female Gaze’. With the term developed in response to the writings of feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey, this podcast series will explore how the work of the female photographers and creatives collaborating with Dior offers a radically new and progressive image of women.

In this episode, series host Charlotte Jansen, a British journalist and author, speaks with Jodi Bieber, a Johannesburg-based photographer who eschews categorizations of her work and casts a singular, gimlet eye on the worlds she documents. Despite having photographed many distressing subject matters and harrowing events worldwide, she rejects the label of ‘photojournalist’ and has no interest in objectifying or typecasting people or places. From her native South Africa to Afghanistan, from women prisoners to intimate portraits of her husband during lockdown, her work is characterized by a modest wonder at the richness and diversity of human life.

Jodi Bieber was born in Johannesburg in 1966. In the early ’90s she trained under David Goldblatt and Ken Oosterbroek, two major figures of photojournalism and portraiture respectively in South Africa. Her first professional commission was to cover the 1994 South African general election, and in 2000 she documented the Uganda ebola outbreak for the New York Times magazine. She has continued to travel the world, working extensively with international NGOs, and has undertaken many commissions at home, such as her exquisitely honest images of the Soweto township. She has published four monographs of her photographs and her works feature in many major collections, including the Johannesburg Art Gallery and the Pinault Collection. In 2010, she won the World Press Photo of the Year award for her haunting portrait of Bibi Aisha, a young Afghan woman brutally disfigured by the Taliban.

Here, Charlotte and Jodi talk in depth and across the board, from Bieber’s dedication to the education of her students in Johannesburg and the unique and idiosyncratic project she undertook through lockdown, photographing her husband François in a variety of bizarre and surreal costumes. She considers the juxtaposition of the seriousness of much of her subject matter with the humor and absurdity necessary to cope with the unique circumstances of 2020. She describes the multiple faces of her hometown, the beautiful light and the diversity which makes it such a remarkable city. She also shares her razor-sharp observations about the current conditions and challenges of making images of women in South Africa and indeed worldwide and the extraordinary pictures she took of the Dior Cruise 2020 collection.

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[Female gaze] Bettina Rheims, a major figure in the world of portrait photography, discusses her remarkable forty-year career. Sep 17, 2020

Show notes

Welcome to this eleventh episode of the new Dior Talks series ‘The Female Gaze’. With the term developed in response to the writings of feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey, this podcast series will explore how the work of the female photographers and creatives collaborating with Dior offers a radically new and progressive image of women.

In this episode, series host Charlotte Jansen, a British journalist and author, speaks with one of the legendary figures of photography in the last half century. Bettina Rheims has been prominent and highly prolific in the world of portraiture, and also fashion photography, for four decades, having first picked up a camera in 1978. She started by photographing a group of female striptease artists and became fascinated by capturing the femininity, power and corporeality of womanhood. This is a fascination which she has maintained ever since in a long and varied career.

Bettina Rheims was born in the Paris suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine in 1952, into a family deeply involved with the worlds of art, literature and the media. Her passion for photography evolved in the late 1970s, after she had already had careers as a model, journalist and gallerist. She had published almost twenty books of her images from the 1980s to the 2010s. She has photographed Catherine Deneuve, Charlotte Rampling, Madonna, Marianne Faithful and Claudia Schiffer amongst many, many others. She has also undertaken advertising campaigns for numerous fashion labels and worked with countless international magazines. She has always combined her skill in capturing the unique qualities of her famous female subjects with an interest in the bizarre, shocking and subcultural. She has had solo exhibitions at the Centre Pompidou, the Kunsthal Rotterdam and the Musée d’Art Contemporain, Lyon. In 2016, as part of the #TheWomenBehindTheLens project initiated by Maria Grazia Chiuri, Rheims photographed Laetitia Casta for Dior Magazine as the embodiment of a modern, liberated woman.

In this week’s episode, Jansen speaks with Rheims about her radical ideas of beauty and femininity, and how these have evolved over the years. Having taken portraits of prisoners, porn actors, political figures and countless women both cisgender and trans, Rheims has constantly expanded and developed notions of womanhood and womanly strength. When asked why she photographs women, Rheims answers with characteristic honesty, “This is the question I have been asked the most. I haven’t yet found an answer.” This episode represents a treasured opportunity to hear her deepest thoughts on this and other prescient subjects.

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[Female gaze] Fashion photographer Nadine Ijewere talks about heritage, combating cultural stereotypes and shooting the cover of Vogue at 27 Sep 04, 2020

Show notes

Welcome to this tenth episode of the new Dior Talks series ‘The Female Gaze’. With the term developed in response to the writings of feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey, this podcast series will explore how the work of the female photographers and creatives collaborating with Dior offers a radically new and progressive image of women.

In this episode, series host Charlotte Jansen, a British journalist and author, talks to Nadine Ijewere, who is making major strides in the world of fashion photography at a remarkably young age. Despite a childhood passion for the art, Ijewere decided to forego the usual career ladder of studio apprenticeships and assisting, identifying early on a profound lack of true and representative images of women of color in the fashion industry, something she has consistently worked to rectify. From her first images of her group of ethnically diverse girlfriends to her work for major magazines, galleries and photo festivals, she hones her critical study of concepts of beauty and builds on her ongoing project to turn physical imperfections upside down.

Nadine Ijewere was born in 1992 and grew up in South-East London with Jamaican and Nigerian heritage. Photography was a creative outlet for her through her school years and she went on to study it at the London College of Fashion. After graduating she chose the atypical step of working in interior design, whilst continuing to shoot images of her friends in her spare time. Concerned by the crass stereotyping of ethnicities and cultures in fashion imagery, she worked with models of color from the start and posted her early work on social media. Quickly gaining recognition for her refreshing and searching depictions of multiracial subjects, she has since been in great demand for her ability to create beautiful fashion images which, through their reflection of her own diverse heritage and community, have offered a sorely needed break from the clichés and compartmentalization characteristic of the industry. In 2019, at the incredibly young age of 27, she became the first woman of color to shoot the cover of any Vogue magazine, with British Vogue. She has worked with many major publications around the world and has exhibited her work widely, including at Tate Britain in 2016 and the Lagos Photo Festival in 2017.

Here, Charlotte Jansen and Nadine Ijewere chat about London life, the diversity of the city and the very specific experience of being a child of mixed heritage in a white majority society, from the attitudes to black women’s hair to the preconceived perceptions which are invariably never far away. They discuss Ijewere’s modest disbelief at being invited to shoot the cover of Vogue, as well as her recent receipt of the International Center of Photography’s 2020 Infinity Award. She describes her surprised excitement at the rapid trajectory of her career and the influential and inspiring figures she is collaborating with. Not least, she reflects on the experience of shooting the Dior 2020 Cruise campaign and working with Creative Director of Women’s collections Maria Grazia Chiuri.

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