Maria Grazia Chiuri’s Dior Cruise ’24 show, which took place in Mexico City on May 20, was no different. The Dior house’s relationship with Mexico has a rich history – with Christian Dior’s taste for travel and foreign cultures manifesting throughout his early collections. One of his first dresses was named ‘Mexico’, after all. This was followed by ‘Acapulco’, ‘Soirée à Mexico’ and ‘Mexique,’ a tulle dress embroidered with golden scales, which he created for autumn-winter 1951.

For the Cruise ’24 show, now-Creative Director Maria Grazia Chiuri chose to honour this early infatuation of Dior’s with a show presented in Mexico which celebrated all the many interesting strands of Mexican artisanal practices, including the artistry of Frida Kahlo.

The collection took its vision from the work of self-taught and iconic painter Frida Kahlo. Known for her masculine-meets-feminine aesthetic, the artist spoke not only about gender, identity and bisexuality – revolutionary for the time she lived in – but also about the struggles of a body that was ravished at a young age by polio.

Maria Grazia Chiuri on drawing from Frida Kahlo: ‘Everybody looks at the iconography of her artwork in a superficial way, but her life is incredible because she explored the relationship between her body and her clothes. She was so conscious of that. Frida talked about disabilities and forging her own identity way back in the 1930s and 1940s’.

To further canonise Kahlo, Maria Grazia Chiuri chose an incredibly special location for the show – the Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso, where the Mexican painter studied, and also where she first met husband Diego Rivera, who was instrumental to her work at various points.