Dior Shows in Kyoto Under the Cherry Blossoms of Tō-ji

Dior presented its Fall 2025 women’s collection on 15 April 2025 in the gardens of Tō-ji, the temple in the south of Kyoto whose five-storey pagoda is one of the emblems of the city. The show took place at nightfall, with the cherry trees in full bloom.

The connection between Dior and Japan is old. In 1953 Christian Dior became the first Western couturier to show his collections in Japan, and he worked with Japanese textile houses from the same period. He collected prints by Utamaro and Hokusai, which had decorated his childhood home in Normandy and which he compared to his Sistine Chapel. Maria Grazia Chiuri, then the creative director of the women’s collections, built the Kyoto collection on that history.

Her starting point was a jacket designed by Christian Dior in 1957 to be worn over a kimono, and the collection explored the same idea of clothes cut around the body rather than fitted to it: wrapped coats and jackets held by wide belts that recalled the obi, wide trousers, and split-toe boots derived from tabi. The show closed with long tulle dresses embroidered with plants and flowers.

Two Kyoto workshops were central. Tabata Kihachi, a master of yuzen dyeing whose family has practised the technique for generations, worked on motifs taken from Jardin Japonais, a cherry-blossom print used by Dior in 1953. Tatsumura Textile, the Kyoto weaving house founded in the 19th century, recreated a brocade that it had first made for Christian Dior that same year.

Chiuri has said her research began with an exhibition at the National Museum of Modern Art in Kyoto on the exchanges between Japanese and Western dress. The show was one of her last for the house, which she left the following month.

It also belongs to a wider pattern. Luxury houses have increasingly taken their travelling shows to Asian cities and anchored them in local history, as Chanel did in Hangzhou a few months earlier. In Kyoto, where the top hotels have multiplied since 2019, the infrastructure for such events now exists, from Aman Kyoto to Six Senses.