It’s widely known that Christian Dior was the designer of dreams. A Parisian couturier, he built a high fashion house that dressed the women of Paris and the world in extraordinary gowns, elegant day dresses and the New Look. Eventually, he suited men too. Now, under the artistic direction of Kim Jones, Dior’s menswear touches every bourgeois space, dousing them with the house’s exceptionally elegant savoir faire and irresistible magic. One such space is the ballet.
In 1955, Monsieur Dior designed the wedding dress of Royal Ballet starlet Margot Fonteyn. Maria Grazia Chiuri’s SS19 collection for the house spotlighted dancers Isadora Duncan and Loïe Fuller who wore gauzy frocks with pleated tulle skirts and ballet pumps while the show featured a performance imagined by choreographer Sharon Eyal. Jones’s AW24 menswear show was directly inspired by the Soviet-born, influential ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev and Colin Jones, a former British Royal Ballet dancer who is also the designer’s late uncle. Models wore couture-ified off-duty dancer looks with ballet flats and fitted tops while they walked – or stood like Roman statues atop a revolving platform – to ‘Dance of the Knights’, which famously scored Sergei Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet. Back in March of this year, Chiuri twirled into the dance world again, designing the costumes for Nuit Blanche, a ballet paying homage to the composer and musician Philip Glass, that was performed at the Teatro dell’Opera di Roma.
Now, Jones has lent his deft hand to Reece Clarke, principal dancer of The Royal Ballet, for his performance at the 35th Charleston Festival which took place Tuesday. Performing a reimagining of Vaslav Nijinsky’s The Afternoon of a Faun with choreography by Russell Maliphant OBE, PhD, the award-winning director and choreographer of Russell Maliphant Dance Company, Clarke was the focal point of a live performance by celebrated pianists Melvyn Tan and Churen Li using two Steinway pianos (as originally imagined by the composers), accompanied by dramatic readings by actor David Morrissey. First performed for the Ballet Russes over 100 years ago (and causing an uproar that dramatically changed how the world thought about music and dance), for this updated rendition of the nine-minute solo, Clarke wore a bespoke costume that featured a brilliant jersey embroidered tank top and jersey leggings, with Nuryev Dior trousers from the AW24 show and a fluid tailored coat with a drawstring at the back. “The costume lends perfectly to Russell’s choreography and allows me to move freely and extend my limbs, whilst maintaining a sculpted frame and showcase the male form,” Clarke tells 10, adding “It’s so incredibly exciting to be involved in a project alongside two incredible artists, Kim Jones and Russell Maliphant. I have been inspired by both their creations respectively and to be able to collaborate with them and combine their genius for this new solo performance has been a match made in heaven. I’ve been lucky enough to wear some of Kim’s designs in the past but to have the chance to perform in a custom look is just the highest honour and I’m so grateful… It’s so wonderful that Kim has taken this moment to combine his love for fashion and dance, and he has created something visually striking that really encapsulates the narrative that my solo performance is based on… I feel so honoured to be wearing a custom Dior look by Kim Jones for the world premiere of [The Afternoon of a] Faun.”
“I started wearing the prototype costume in my rehearsals with choreographer Russell Maliphant from our very first rehearsal together. When I had the costume on, it enabled Russell and myself to capture the ‘human’ element of this reimagined choreography. The original choreography is based on a Faun and themes of lust, desire, love and rejection, in a fantasy-like setting and Russell has brought this into the present day and has created a more ‘human’ approach to the piece,” says Clarke.
An annual 10-day affair celebrating the radical creativity of The Bloomsbury Group – who once resided in Charleston and was made up of some of the 20th century’s most forward-thinking artists, writers and thinkers including Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Clive Bell and Duncan Grant amongst others – Charleston Festival commissions and curates a series of original productions by today’s most exciting artists, thinkers and changemakers to imagine society differently. Maliphant says, “Both the Bloomsbury Group and Ballet Russes created fantastically fertile periods for the arts which have inspired generations ever since – including me – and I’m excited to have the opportunity to offer a new work for the Charleston Festival this year, with the very talented principal dancer Reece Clarke. Having created a piece inspired by the dancer Nijinsky (‘Afterlight’) back in 2009 it’s a privilege to have an opportunity to work on another Nijinsky link by way of [The] Afternoon of a Faun and to seek inspiration again from these landmark movements.” Dior too has ties to the group. For Jones’s SS23 Dior menswear show, he was inspired by Grant and applied some of the artist’s paintings to knitwear. “It’s an added honour to have costumes created by Kim Jones for Dior and to re-imagine and collaborate for this occasion,” says the choreographer.
Clarke’s performance, as part of the Charleston charity’s ongoing Music + Word series compiled by Paul Boucher, marks the first time Music + Word has been programmed as part of the festival. This year Music + Word: The Rite of Spring and The Afternoon of a Faun was a multi-artform event celebrating the modernist music of Claude Debussy and Igor Stravinsky.
Charleston Festival kicked off May 16 and will run until May 27. Discover the festival here.
Photography by Rosie Powell.
