Dior/Lindbergh was Peter Lindbergh’s final project for the house before his death in September of last year. Shot on the streets of New York, this weighty two volume compendium offers a fresh perspective on over 70 years of Dior’s history. Set against the chaos of Times Square, iconic silhouettes, from Christian Dior’s era to Maria Grazia Chiuri’s, are photographed in Lindbergh’s characteristic style.

It features an introduction from art historian and curator Martin Harrison, who draws parallels between Lindbergh’s photographs and Expressionistic cinema of the 1920s – the dramatic lighting and intensified black and white tonality of the photographs.

“His photographs,” Harrison writes, “frequently recall still-frames from a short movie of his devising. But he is not a story-teller, exactly: rather, he gives us brief snatches of a tantalizing and open-ended narrative.”

Dior allowed unprecedented access to both contemporary and archival garments from the Dior Museum, shipping them across the Atlantic to Manhattan. Felice Noordhoff is photographed in a voluminous black dress designed by Christian Dior from 1948, Alek Wek is spotted in a crowd of tourists wearing a cream Bar jacket from 1947, Freja Beha walks by MacDonald’s in John Galliano’s AW01 collection.

Contrasting the glamour of Dior against the urban architecture of New York’s Times Square, Lindbergh explored an industrial aesthetic from a disorientating perspective. Dior has described the work as “Decisive moments capturing haute couture and a frenetic urban landscape [which] pay homage to the street photography movement for which New York frequently served as a backdrop”.

This photobook is the culmination of a partnership between two icons of fashion that spanned decades, pronounced by Harrison as “both a masterstroke of recontextualization and a crazy extravaganza”.

Dior/Lindbergh is published by Taschen and is available here.


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