Step Inside the Provençal Paradise of “Christian Dior: Jardins Rêvés”

Over the summer at The Savannah College of Art and Design in Provence, a sweeping fashion exhibition opened in the SCAD FASH Lacoste gallery named “Christian Dior: Jardins Rêvés” (May 8–September 28, 2025). Created exclusively by Christian Dior in collaboration with SCAD, the exhibition was organized by Hélène Starkman, the exhibition curator for Christian Dior Couture, and Rafael Gomes, the director of SCAD FASH museums. Together, they traced the couturier’s lifelong fascination with flowers and gardens—from his childhood home in Granville to his retreat in Montauroux—through an exquisite selection of nearly 30 haute couture garments and more than 60 accessories and perfumes. 

“It has been an incredible honor to collaborate with Dior on this exclusive exhibition for SCAD. The curation of this exhibition represents a unique intersection of artistry, craftsmanship, and innovation, showcasing the timeless elegance and bold creativity that define Dior’s legacy,” said Gomes. “Notably, this exhibition celebrates the work of all the visionary designers who have contributed to the House of Dior, from Christian Dior himself to the present day. It is our hope that this exhibition sparks new ideas, fosters creative exploration, and encourages the next generation of artists to push the boundaries of fashion and design.”

Inside, the two-floor presentation immersed us into the Dior universe, where haute couture garments, accessories, and artifacts from 1905 to 2025—like illustrations from catalogues, photographs, and even textiles created by Christian Dior himself—reigned. The show was inspired by the founding couturier’s love for flowers and gardens, exhibiting items from Monsieur Christian Dior and each of his successors, including Yves Saint Laurent, Marc Bohan, Gianfranco Ferré, John Galliano, Raf Simons, and Maria Grazia Chiuri.

On the first floor, garments were illuminated, revealing the brand’s early focus on being a lifestyle brand and the hand-crafted details it infused to make it one of the world’s most regarded ateliers. Dresses by Christian Dior himself, like the unmissable Musique piece from Fall/Winter 1956, joined contemporary creations, illustrating each designer’s unique language inspired by craft, culture, art, and more.

“It has been an incredible honor to collaborate with Dior on this exclusive exhibition for SCAD. The curation of this exhibition represents a unique intersection of artistry, craftsmanship, and innovation, showcasing the timeless elegance and bold creativity that define Dior’s legacy,” said Gomes. “Notably, this exhibition celebrates the work of all the visionary designers who have contributed to the House of Dior, from Christian Dior himself to the present day. It is our hope that this exhibition sparks new ideas, fosters creative exploration, and encourages the next generation of artists to push the boundaries of fashion and design.”

Starkman then led us from the first floor to the second level, passing iconic illustrations by René Gruau throughout the stairway. In addition to sweeping gowns and headpieces by milliner Stephen Jones, the upstairs presentation also featured the brand’s coveted “Cabinet of Curiosities”—a selection of pieces in individual vignettes, arranged under inviting light in a glass bookshelf. Lesser-seen perfume bottles—like Diorissimo, created by Monsieur Dior in 1956—joined Saddle handbags, Dior heels, leather opera gloves, and several floral-topped headbands, headdresses, and bonnets.  

“Flowers have always been at the heart of Christian Dior’s creations. Their shapes, ever-changing colors, minute details, all evoke memories of his joyful childhood in the Granville family home,” said Starkman. “When he became a couturier, it was in the gardens he had imagined for his country houses that he sketched his collections. He needed this return to nature, far away from the Paris hustle and bustle, to create the fashion of tomorrow. When he died in 1957, flowers became one of the most prominent inspirations for his successors, who each wove their own floral language. Today, it is a real pleasure to be able to exhibit the Dior creations so close to nature, in an environment that the founding couturier himself would have loved.” 

Adorning both spaces, too, were immersive scenes of laser-cut paper flowers created by the Spain-based design studio Wanda Barcelona. Created by Inti Velez Botero, Daniel Mancini, and Iris Joval in 2007, the company has been a collaborator of Dior’s since 2013, creating exquisite atmospheres of handcrafted origami-style flowers in dialogue with those found on many Dior garments and accessories—from roses to lush leaves. For the installation, 16 skilled artisans worked for three months in Barcelona to design and draw the flowers, then vectorize and laser-cut them to petal perfection. Afterward, leaves, petals, pistils, sepals, and stems were then carefully assembled by hand using tweezers. 

“We crafted more than 4,000 flowers for this wondrous garden,” Mancini told Whitewall at the show. “We designed three new beautiful species for this exhibition—poppies, violets, and brunneras—which are all present in the dresses and are a perfect match for the flowers we used in previous exhibitions, like roses, wisteria, lily of the valley, creeping Jenny, and mind-your-own business.”

After a tour of the exhibition, Whitewall sat down with Starkman and Gomes to hear more about how they imagined “Christian Dior: Jardins Rêvés” and why the fashion house remains true to the pursuit of beauty, craft, and inspiration. 

Creating “Christian Dior: Jardins Rêvés”

WHITEWALL: Hélène, you’ve curated Dior exhibitions all over the world, including “Design of Dreams” and the brand’s recent show at the World’s Fair in Osaka. What is it like seeing this exhibition come to life here?

HELENE STARCKMAN: It’s really nice to see an exhibition come to life in such a scenic place. We’re coming back from Seoul and Osaka, and the “Designer of Dreams” exhibition we previously did with in Riyadh, so it’s completely different. And here, there’s this energy with all the students—it’s completely different from what we usually do. That’s very lovely. I really like the idea that Christian Dior liked to create in the garden. He went back to the garden to create.  I feel like this is kind of what SCAD is doing by bringing students to Lacoste.  It’s giving them this space, which is a million miles away from Savannah or Atlanta. I think when you’re here, you’re probably in a very different creative state of mind. It’s very interesting for us to bring these flower dresses back to nature. It’s a very impressionist way of doing an exhibition, you know? [Laughs]

WW: You spoke of SCAD students coming and going, and so much of the experience here in Lacoste is obviously education-based. Can you tell us a bit about your role at the house, and how your work, focused on exhibitions, continues to educate people around the world?

HS: I’m coordinating all the exhibitions around the world, and I get to work with the most amazing people. I get to work with curators. I get to work with set designers. I can nourish myself on the vision that other people  have of Dior. Usually, curators change subjects, but we don’t. Our subject will always be Dior. But there are so many ways of telling the story and there are so many scales that you can tell the story at.  We had an exhibition of miniature dresses. We had a gigantic exhibition, like the one at Les Arts Décoratifs. We had very different takes when we did the exhibition in the states—“From Paris to the World”—where we were trying to show different international influences on the house of Dior. 

I feel like the history is so rich that there’s always going to be new ways to tell it. And when you meet with other people that come to you with a project, it’s always interesting to try and find new ways of making a new project. For this, there were going to be students, but there was also going to be local people, and probably a lot of tourists because it’s Luberon in the summer. There’s going to be an international audience. So, it’s about asking, “How do you tell the story in a way that all of these types of visitors can understand and learn?” 

We like for people to take away something and learn, but what’s very specific here is the presence of all the students and the fact that they can understand that they can be a designer—or an embroiderer or someone who makes paper flowers or someone who makes feather work or hand-dies garments or makes hats.

I studied at École de la Chambre Syndicale in Paris, the school for fashion, and I was shown a certain number of possibilities of careers. But when I got into fashion, it was suddenly like another world opened up and there were so many different people.  That’s one of the things I like most in exhibitions. Exhibitions are like collections. A designer cannot really make a full collection on their own. It takes so many different people, especially at that level. An exhibition is the same. You need somebody to curate, somebody to do the dressing in a way that’s going to be conservation-approved. You need the people from the archive to do some conservation work, maybe some restoration. You need special mounters. 

For example, here, all the objects that are displayed  have an invisible mount. You don’t see it—and that’s a very specific skill. I honestly don’t think I knew all of these exhibition-related jobs existed before I started working with fashion exhibitions. There’s a lot to take in from “Jardin Rêvés.” The first thing is the dream and the dream world that you’re able to enter, and then the education—and everything that you can be in the field of fashion. 

Collaborating with Christian Dior

WW: Rafael, what was it like collaborating with Dior and Hélène to make this exhibition come to life?  

RAFAEL GOMES: It was fantastic. We are so grateful that Dior created something special for us. It’s really made for our space. For our students, it’s not just the history of the house of Dior, it’s also fashion history. We can use this as a teaching tool, and we are very, very grateful for it. It’s very special.

HS: It’s also the idea of the collaboration. We were like, “Oh, maybe we could work with Wanda Barcelona again,” and then SCAD had a conversation with them. It was discussed how we can make special flowers here because they’re always one of a kind, so this is also a collaboration of displays and of the design, because SCAD worked on the design, too. We asked how we could build the space—so that was a really interesting conversation. 

WW: Do you have a favorite vignette in the exhibition?

RG: The Maria Grazia dress with the pressed silk flowers. I saw this in the magazines and on Instagram. It was all over the place. It was so nice and beautiful, but I learned here to really appreciate what she did by seeing it in person. The 3-D silk flowers were pressed and then put between layers. Oh, my God! It opened a universe for itself. The other dress, too, that was made entirely out of feathers—you don’t see that in photographs. You appreciate it even more when you see this in person. 

HS: Today, people see exhibitions through images—through Instagram. We document the exhibitions a lot and a lot of people today take a lot of pictures when they see the exhibition, but I like to think that you’re still going have a very different feel when you see it in person. It’s also really interesting that we’re here at the same time as DRIFT, with the “Bloom” experience. I could have seen a photo of my flower but seeing it move in person is a totally different experience. I’d like to say that you’re going to live it. It’s going to be a lot more up-close-and-personal if you visit the exhibition. You’re going to be completely surrounded by this paper garden and you’ll have the music. You’ll have the full experience.  I think it’s nice that there’s still the difference of looking at a picture of the exhibition, and actually seeing it in person. Meeting the dresses in person.

One of my personal favorites is Maria Grazia’s black dress with the stripes. Not only is the embroidery amazingly crazy—it’s hand embroidered in India by the Chanakya ateliers, who Maria Grazia works with a lot—but also the shape of it. It’s shaped like the flowers. There’s so much volume. There’s so much fabric. It’s so beautiful. 

Two years ago when we had a show in Mumbai, we did a small exhibition showing some of the dresses that were embroidered by Chanakya ateliers, and some of their garments and accessories next to our dresses. They also showed their archive, which might have been an inspiration for Maria Grazia on some of the dresses. We had some savoir faire demonstrations, where they showed all their techniques, and that black dress… I was so fascinated by it. Somebody was showing how it was embroidered, and I think I could have just sat there and watched him for hours. It must have taken hundreds of hours, maybe thousands. 

Acquiring Items for the Christian Dior Archive

WW: Some of the pieces in the exhibition, like that gorgeous red dress, are being seen for the first time. You mentioned some were recently acquired from places like estate sales—and that the house buys just about anything it comes across made by Dior, from documents to garments. Can you tell us about some of those new pieces?

HS: Yes, there’s the red dress, and the sparkly, fitted dress at the top that’s more cocktail. These are very recent acquisitions. Perrine is the Director of Dior Heritage, which is our archive. She can tell you that acquisition is such a huge part of the job of her team. There’s a new acquisition almost every day. 

WW: Perrine you sourcing these items? Are people coming to you to sell?

PERRINE SCHERRER: Both. We are acquiring a lot of types of objects—not only textiles and accessories, but also objects, photography, and documents. Anything that can enrich our collection is coming to us. We are keeping an eye on everything!

WW: Do your teams work closely together?

HS: Yes. We’re always talking about what just came in. It’s exciting. It’s so much fun! Let’s be honest, it’s so exciting to see the garments in person. It’s things we’ve seen in pictures for so long, even black and white photos, and then suddenly, the real dress comes along in color and it’s embroidered, and it’s like Christmas! 

WW: Is the acquisitions team now also open to categories like menswear and baby?

PS: Yes. 

HS: And even homewares! Dior did homeware in the 1950s, so we’re also acquiring that. It’s like Dior Maison today, but it already existed at the time of Christian Dior—vases, plates… 

PS: We even bought back big books of swatches by the supplier who used to do fabric and prints for Christian Dior. We’re keeping anything that is related to Christian Dior himself, his life, or the company. 

HS: And we’re in touch with all the models that are still alive. There are three models who worked with Christian Dior who are still alive—and we’re doing interviews to give testimonies on what it was like working with him. And anyone who worked for Dior as a seamstress that we’re in touch with… There’s a man who used to do drawings, for instance, and sometimes you see him in videos or interviews that we do and are posted online.  A few years ago, Louis Prigent, the journalist, did a documentary about the sketches at Christian Dior, so we were able to orient him to somebody who used to work in the atelier. It’s a network that’s still very much alive.

WW: When did the Christian Dior archive begin? 

HS: It’s interesting because the dresses that were in the shows are one of a kind. What’s really interesting about the couture archive is the concept of a couture archive itself—it’s a very contemporary concept. In the ‘40s and ‘50s, and even after, the point was to sell the dresses, not keep them. It was only in the late ‘80s that the process of constituting an archive started. 

In 1987, Les Artécoratifs presented the first show called “Hommage de Christian Dior.” At that time, there weren’t a lot of dresses in the archive. Very luckily, we have a lot of documents—like original sketches, press sketches, illustrations, articles, a lot of books where they cut out the articles and they did these books. We also have collection charts, which are these big pages with a swatch, a sketch, and documentation, but dresses? We didn’t have a lot. That’s when it started. 

WW: Upstairs, there is a Lily of the Valley perfume bottle, and you mentioned there were several in the fragrance archive. Is that a separate archive—fragrance and makeup? Are they also acquiring items?

HS: Yes, we are two companies—Christian Dior Couture and Christian Dior Parfum. For perfume, what’s interesting is that what was created was created in multiple quantities. They have many of each in their archive. It’s a very different story because it was a different company—and it still is a different company. For example, the Diorissimo bottle, there are maybe five or six in the archive. And they buy back items as well. Makeup, lipsticks, perfume bottles—these are things they look for.