If you haven’t already seen it, Dior’s SS 2021 collection was launched with the most stunning short film. Creative director Maria Grazia Chiuri opted for a mystical approach to haute couture, with a fantastical film about the arcane. 

Le Château du Tarot begins with a young woman asking a tarot reader, “Who am I?” She selects a card—the high priestess—and finds herself in a castle (le château), encountering the characters and symbols of the tarot deck all clad entirely in new season Dior.

Chiuri settled on tarot as the inspiration for the season because of the way humans look to the mystical to untangle our lives in difficult and overwhelming times. 

“What was nice for me about the tarot is that when you are in a difficult moment, something that is magical can help us, to help us think better,” she told Vogue, acknowledging the emotional upheaval of the pandemic and subsequent isolation. “It’s a long time we’ve all been staying alone. You think much more about many aspects of yourself and your life. That’s my belief: This year changed us a lot.”

She recruited director Matteo Garrone to make the film, the second time the pair have collaborated—he created the similarly mystical film for AW 2020, Le Mythe Dior. 

“We decided to film a story about this girl who goes inside a castle. It’s a labyrinth which represents an interior trip,” explained Chiuri.

“When she meets each of [the tarot] figures, she has to reach a decision about her life. And on the other hand, she meets aspects of her own personality and learns not to be scared of the future.” 

The young woman encounters the High Priestess, Temperance, Justice and Death, as well as the Sun, the Moon, the Fool and the Hanged Man, all wearing in Renaissance-inspired clothing with heavy overtones of fairytale style. Corsets, stiff bodices, brocades, full skirts, goddess-like dresses and floor-grazing capes all appear here. 

The film ends when the young woman meets destiny and her masculine and feminine identities merge to become one, after a fairytale-worthy kiss in a large stone bath. 

Chiuri’s ongoing fascination with the mystical is not without precedent—Christian Dior himself was a believer.

“He discovered tarot in the Second World War, when his sister Catherine, who was part of the French Resistance, disappeared,” Chiuri explained. “In my view, I think he was so scared about her situation that he probably went to the tarot cards to try to know some more, to hope that she would come back. I think he was very worried; trying to find hope in some signs.”

Italian-born Chiuri, in turn, chose to study the first known set of similar cards, the Visconti-Sforza deck, because of its origins in Italy. It was created by Bonifacio Bembo around 1400 as a way to amuse the Duke of Milan, and it wasn’t until around three hundred years later that the French adopted it as a way to tell fortunes. 

Here in 2021, tarot offers a way to make sense of the incomprehensible world we live in—or at the very least, inspires truly magical fashion. 

PSA: You should add these French pharmacy products to your beauty routine ASAP.

Author Bio:

Hannah Warren

Hannah was born in New Zealand and is based wherever she can set down a laptop. She's been playing with words since she could first pick up a pen, and in her spare time she's a pole dancer, pasta glutton and dog mum.

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