Joana Vasconcelos is an artist known for using different mediums to create her art. Day to day, many objects, many related to the traditional woman's sphere, are transformed and given new meanings. Beautiful crochet panels wrapped on porcelain sculptures or even three-dimensional, undefined shapes built entirely in colorful crochet are commonplace in her art.
She is a Portuguese, world-known artist with exhibitions in incredible places like the Venice Biennale, Guggenheim Bilbao, and the Versailles Palace, where, in 2012, she was not only the first woman to have an exhibition, it was the most visited in France in 50 years, with a record number of 1.6 million visitors.
As an artist, Joana Vasconcelos is not limited to the traditional space of art. So it's no wonder when we see her work at the Paris Fashion Week, in Dior’s fall/winter 2023 runway show.
This was not the first time that the artist had collaborated with the brand. In 2013, Dior commissioned her to create a piece celebrating J'Adore, the brand's first fragrance, and to pay homage to Miss Dior. The piece is an enormous golden bow filled with thousands of illuminated J'Adore perfume bottles.
In 2019, she reinterpreted the iconic Lady Dior bag with an LED heart. This year the tribute is to Catherine Dior, sister of Christian Dior, a French resistance fighter captured by the Gestapo in 1944, deported to the Ravensbrück concentration camp, and released in 1945.
Valkyrie Miss Dior is an impressive dream-like installation built on a fusion of fabric, lights, embroidery, and crochet assembled together. This piece took six months to design and build. As we all know, crochet pieces have to be handmade; there is no machine for that, so we can only imagine the number of hours and hands needed!
We can follow Joana Vasconcelos's work on her Instagram account and on her YouTube channel, where we can have a glimpse of her atelier hustle and bustle. I'm already curious about what she's going to do next.
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