The dialetics between femininity and feminism in the identity construction of Dior: An analysis of the debut collection by Maria Grazia Chiuri

• Autor(a) principal: Souza, Thais da Costa Monteiro de
• Data de Publicação: 2022
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.26/39391
• topic: Fashion; Consumerism; Feminism; Femininity; Dior; Hypermodernity; Liquid modernity; Sociodiscursive construction of identities; Gender ideology; Ethnocentrism; Cosmopolitanism

Based on the concept of Fashion as a system (Lipovetsky, 2009), this work aims to investigate where Maria Grazia Chiuri’s inspiration for her debut collection for Dior came from and how gender ideology and the consumerism of luxury items have been imbricated since she took over as creative director of the brand. Thereafter, this research seeks to understand how the designer's inspiration and the question of gender ideology might have created a new identity at Dior and, therefore, its consumer. To this end, a qualitative-interpretative analysis (Erickson, 1986) of Maria Grazia Chiuri's first collection is carried out through the lenses of theoretical assumptions related to Liquid Modernity (Bauman, 2000), Hypermodernity (Lipovetsky, 2004), the sociodiscursive construction of identities (Bucholtz and Hall, 2005), gender expression and performativity (Butler, 1999; Adichie, 2014), and the psychology of consumer ethnocentrism and cosmopolitanism (Prince et. al. 2020). The data suggest a dialectical relationship between feminine and feminism throughout Chiuri's debut collection, and point to Fashion as a powerful instrument, through which sociocultural (r)evolutions may be proposed.