Dior shines in Paris in the heat of the Games

The house of Dior, a firm intrinsically linked to the essential practice of French Haute Couture, has ended up occupying a preferential and honorable place in the festivities on the occasion of the inauguration of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games. An event that is serving to offer a renewed and dazzling image of the city, at all times, and as could be seen during the opening ceremony of the Games - despite the wet weather - under the intoxicating shadow of that same couture that serves as an image, symbol, and flag of the city before the world.

Without ever overlooking the fundamental role that the fashion industry itself, as a whole, is playing in the framework of the celebrations of these Paris 2024 Olympic Games, being as it is the sector that has been responsible precisely for composing and dressing all the different Olympic teams with the different uniforms that they will be showing off during the competitions, it was already expected that among all the fashion firms that are participating, both indirectly and directly, in these celebrations, it would be the houses linked to the LVMH group that would end up positioning themselves in a place of honor. A place that they have not hesitated to occupy, asserting the position of the French multinational holding company specializing in the luxury industry as the official “premium partner” of these Olympic Games, for whose celebrations LVMH has not hesitated to seek to exploit all its relationships and links with Paris and with the sporting values ​​that are praised from each new edition of the Olympic Games.

With that in mind, Louis Vuitton has been and is participating in the celebrations by designing the trophy trunks and medal boxes that will be used to recognize the three best athletes in each of the different Olympic disciplines in Paris 2024; for the opening ceremony of which it dressed the musicians Rim'K and Shaheem Sanchez. All this, while Berluti, another of the fashion houses in LVMH's portfolio, was in charge of dressing the entire French Olympic delegation; and Chaumet itself, one of the group's main fine jewelry houses, was in charge of designing the medals for these Olympic Games. Games that kicked off in this way with the opening ceremony that took place last Friday, July 26, 2024, during which the house of Dior, the great Haute Couture house of LVMH, once again came out to crown itself and shine in front of the millions of eyes that had their eyes on Paris at that time, dressing the main performances at the opening ceremony of the Olympics. A leading role reserved by LVMH and by the organization for the famous Parisian house, which has thus once again established itself as a "state house", as it already managed to do with that iconic "Lady Dior" bag with which Princess Diana of Wales was entertained by the First Lady of France in 1995, and for which it would end up taking its name, and it did before the celebrations of these Paris 2024 Olympics, when it dressed the Queen of Spain for the dinner offered by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) on the occasion of the opening of the Games.

Queen Letizia, in Dior at the Louvre

As a prelude to the celebrations of these Paris 2024 Olympic Games, the International Olympic Committee held a gala dinner on the evening of last Thursday, July 25 inside the Louvre Museum in the French capital on the occasion of the opening of the Olympic Games. A meeting that was attended by the highest representatives of the different Olympic delegations, and among them also in their capacity as host country with that of the president and first lady of France, Emmanuel and Brigitte Macron, which was attended by the King and Queen of Spain, in the case of Doña Letizia wearing, not without controversy, a Dior Haute Couture ensemble, from its collection for the Spring/Summer 2024 season. An ensemble consisting of a skirt hand-embroidered in sand-colored moiré fabric, with a black silk velvet body with floral-inspired embroidery in gold lamé with rhinestone inlays. Pieces that, to clarify any kind of controversy, Dior clarifies that, like the accessories worn by the Queen of Spain during the evening, were on loan.

Celine Dion, in her comeback during the opening ceremony

For her triumphant return to the stage, which was not even certain to take place given the delicate state of health that the Canadian singer is going through, and which she herself has not hesitated to want to bring to light and narrate in her documentary "I am: Celine Dion", the interpreter of the award-winning "My Heart Will Go On" wore Dior during her already memorable performance from the Eiffel Tower in Paris. A performance during which she performed the song "Hymne à l'Amour" by Edith Piaf, accompanied on the piano by the composer Scott Price, dressed in Dior by Kim Jones, while she was dressed in Dior by Maria Grazia Chiuri, in a custom-made dress, made of white silk georgette covered in sequins and with more than 500 meters of fringe with silver beads, for which more than a thousand hours of work were required.

Axelle Saint-Cirel, with the symbols of France

From the roof of a specially renovated Grand Palais in Paris, opera singer Axelle Saint-Cirel starred in one of the most emotional episodes of the opening ceremony of these Olympic Games, singing “La Marseillaise”, the national anthem of France. A performance that she carried out wearing the same national colors of the host country of these Paris 2024 Games, in an original dress designed by Maria Grazia Chiuri, the creative director of Dior’s women’s collections. A design composed of a white silk tulle bustier seen under a one-shoulder tunic dress, in white and with a train in “France red”, thus completing a singular trompe l’oeil, by virtue of which during the performance the French flag seemed to end up merging into the dress, and this, in turn, with its train, ended up becoming the flag. A performance in which Saint-Cirel was accompanied by a choir of women seated on the Pont Alexandre III over the River Seine, who also wore tunic-style dresses, although with much more sober lines, and in this case in an entirely monochrome finish, in the white, red, and blue colors that shape the national flag of France.

Aya Nakamura, from France to the world

Conceived as a performance to pay tribute to the entire French-speaking community that exists in all corners of the planet, the French singer-songwriter of Malian origin, Aya Nakamura performed her greatest hits during what was discovered as another of the main acts of the opening ceremony of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games. The performance took place on the Pont de Arts, which links the Louvre Museum to the Institut de France, and which Nakamura performed wearing a unique, daring, and fierce ensemble, the result of a reinterpretation of one of the silhouettes from Dior's Haute Couture collection for the Fall/Winter 2024/2025 season. A golden body covered in feathers, which the French performer wore in a renewed version with a short, voluminous skirt and an asymmetrical neckline with straps and a tulle cape on one shoulder, while the dancers who accompanied her did so wearing a different reinterpretation of the same original model, consisting in this case of cargo pants with a feather body.

Lady Gaga pays tribute to Christian Dior and the Paris of cabarets

And closing this list, we go back to the very moment of the opening ceremony of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games, which was opened by the American Lady Gaga, performing from the Place Barye, at the eastern end of the island of Saint Louis, the song “Mon Truc en Plumes” by the iconic French artist Zizi Jeanmaire. A number created by the choreographer Roland Petir in 1961, for whom Christian Dior had already designed various ballet outfits, just as Maria Grazia Chiuri has now been commissioned to do for Lady Gaga. Who dazzled in this way during the opening ceremony of these Olympic Games with a sensational black satin bustier outfit with matching stockings, made by the house of Cadolle, with a short jacket and long skirt, in an always “chic” combination of pink and black, both pieces covered by hand with feathers. Feathers that, Dior points out, were collected during the birds' natural moulting periods, and therefore without causing any harm to any kind of animal, for an outfit that Lady Gaga wore finished off with a matching headdress designed by Stephen Jones, and which the American artist gradually removed as the musical number progressed, ending with the set of a bustier and panties with the "Cul de Paris" characteristic of cabaret revues. All of this, surrounded by twenty musicians and a dozen dancers who wore Dior outfits inspired by the white ensemble with Parisian lines that Audrey Hepburn wore in the cult film Sabrina, carrying pink pompoms made by the legendary Lido de Paris cabaret.

This article was originally published on FashionUnited.ES, translated and edited to English.