Isabella Ducrot’s installation, Big Aura, adorns the walls of the room hosting the Dior spring-summer 2024 haute couture collection in the Rodin Museum gardens. Ducrot's monumental installation Big Aura, composed of twenty-three dresses – about five meters high – the dimensions of which are deliberately disproportionate to the body of an ordinary human. Big Aura echos the dresses of Ottoman sultans studied by Isabella Ducrot. An abstract symbolization of the garment, which emblemizes a power that transcends the body.
Isabella Ducrot during her travels she developed a particular interest in textiles from China, India, Turkey and Central Asia, to the point of making them not only the object of her collection and study, but also of her personal artistic quest. Whether ancient and precious or contemporary and quite standard, the fabrics and cloth are the privileged matter with which the artist produces her works.
Isabella Ducrot quotes: “I remember the first time I saw the ceremonial garments of the sultans of the Ottoman Empire on display in the Topkapi Palace museum in Istanbul; I was deeply struck by their size, they were out of proportion and revealed the sovereign indifference of the court tailors: they had taken no account of the normal anatomy of the human being. It seemed to me that this excessive side, this disproportionate spatial exuberance was there to magnify and reflect the immense power of the sultans. And all this had been achieved without recourse to precious fabrics: no brocade, no pearls, no precious stones, just disproportionate dimensions. Unlike the proverb ‘clothes don’t make the man’, I was convinced the opposite was true: these exaggerated dimensions had ensured grandeur, dignity and sacredness for those who had worn them over the centuries, even when they had fallen from grace.”
Big Aura's thenty-three dresses are placed on a backround that constitutes of a pattern of black lines on a white background that form a gigantic grid. The use of this particular, intentionally irregular and imperfect square pattern, obtained using the ancient artisanal technique of block printing, bears the artist’s signature of sorts. Ducrot often uses this type of geometric pattern not only for aesthetic purposes and the simple pleasure of getting lost in the weave of vertical and horizontal lines, but also with the political intention of honoring the checkered fabric, considered lowly in the history of Western fashion, mainly used and worn as it was by workers, such as farmers, pruners and masons, doing manual labor outdoors. When the squares were small, this fabric was used to make aprons and children’s clothing.
In contrast with the elaboration of the most precious fabrics, squares do not hide the nakedness of the structure required for its existence; on the contrary, they exalt it, declaring in a striking manner that fabric is a conciliation between elements in extreme opposition. The square refers to warp and weft, the two elements that intersect and become the place of all possibilities. An artwork in itself celebrating the plurality of savoir-faire: embroidery, block printing and weaving. Carried out by the Chanakya ateliers and the Chanakya School of Craft, it spotlights exceptional textiles thanks to ancestral looms specially reassembled for the Dior spring-summer 2024 haute couture show.
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