Dior artistic director Maia Grazia Chiuri uses her biannual couture shows to platform artists, with spectacular handmade sets that double as art installations. Past collaborators are some of the biggest names in contemporary art, including Judy Chicago, Eva Jospin, and Madhvi and Manu Parekh. 

This season Mickalene Thomas, an American contemporary artist known for her rhinestone-embellished works that celebrate Black and queer subjects, was the latest collaborator for the Spring 2023 couture show. 

Thomas’s works, I’ve Got it Bad and that Ain’t Good from the She Works Hard for the Money Pin Up series (2006) and Untitled #10 (2014) currently feature in HOTA Gallery’s first ever international blockbuster exhibition. With bold pops of colour, 70s-style patterns, and even one of Warhol’s famous flowers, they invite you into a visual conversation about identity, race, African American culture, and the ways women are represented in pop culture. 

Thomas set the scene for the Dior couture collection of silk and velvet dresses, creating 13 photo collages of women who inspire her, which covered the walls around the runway. The collection's muse was pioneering African American singer and dancer Josephine Baker, which inspired Thomas to open the conversation around Black female role models. 

Thomas used archival photographs to create the collages, highlighting groundbreaking artists, models, and activists, such as singer Eartha Kitt, supermodel and first woman of colour to appear on the cover of Vogue Donyale Luna, and jazz pianist Hazel Scott, the first African American woman to have her own tv show. 

Stop by Pop Masters: Art from the Mugrabi Collection, New York to see Mickalene Thomas’s artworks, contemporary celebrations of femininity and power, alongside iconic works by Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, and Jean-Michel Basquiat.

Credit: Mickalene Thomas, Untitled #10, 2014. Installation view at HOTA Gallery. Photography by Risen Film.