At the 2025 Osaka Expo, Dior presents a refined installation that blends fashion, architecture, and Japanese craftsmanship in a tribute to cultural and creative exchange.
By Fashion Editorial Staff
At the 2025 World Expo in Osaka, Dior unveils a singular vision—an immersive ode to craftsmanship, emotion, and the timeless dialogue between structure and softness. Within the French Pavilion, the Maison’s installation unfolds like a living poem, quietly asserting the power of fashion to move beyond adornment and into the realm of art, architecture, and memory.
Titled Hymne à l'amour—a hymn to love in all its nuanced forms—the presentation invites visitors into a world where gesture becomes language, and where creation is revered as a deeply human act. It is a tribute not only to Dior’s storied heritage, but to its enduring affinity with Japan—a relationship built on mutual reverence for detail, form, and the poetic potential of restraint.
At the heart of the installation, three Bar suits stand in quiet formation, rendered in blue, white, and red—a graceful invocation of French identity through silhouette. First imagined in 1947, the Bar jacket redefined femininity with its architectural lines and cinched waist, and here it is recontextualized as both historical artifact and timeless sculpture. Nearby, the house’s Amphores Tricolores perfume bottles—originally created in 1949 and reissued for Paris 2024—glimmer like votive offerings to the artisanship of another era.
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Threaded through the exhibition is a subtle homage to Christian Dior’s early ambition to become an architect—a dream that never came to pass, yet one that shaped his revolutionary approach to fashion. This narrative is given form in a luminous reinterpretation of the Lady Dior bag by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Kazuyo Sejima. For the 2024 Lady Dior As Seen By series, Sejima has envisioned the iconic bag in pristine white, adorned with translucent crystal elements. The result is both object and apparition: a floating sculpture that evokes light, space, and the serenity of silence.
Over 400 white toiles—some life-sized, others delicately scaled—hover in space like whispers of future garments. They honor the invisible hands of the atelier, the quiet devotion behind every couture creation. These are paired with 3D-printed reinterpretations of Dior’s iconic fragrance bottles, bridging the precision of technology with the intimacy of handcraft.
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Visual poetry comes courtesy of Japanese artist Yuriko Takagi, whose dreamlike imagery animates Dior’s silhouettes in a series of ethereal vignettes. Her work brings the installation into motion, capturing that elusive space between memory and desire, where fashion becomes both fleeting and eternal.
The experience culminates with a luminous gesture from designer Tokujin Yoshioka, whose reinterpretation of Dior’s iconic Medallion chair—recast in crystalline form—stands like a prism refracting the house’s codes through the refined lens of Japanese design.
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In its totality, Dior’s presence at Osaka is not merely an exhibition—it is an atmosphere, a reverie. It dissolves boundaries between disciplines, cultures, and eras, offering a multi-sensory experience rooted in elegance, innovation, and quiet emotion.
In Osaka, fashion becomes a form of diplomacy—not through spectacle, but through sensitivity. It is, above all, a love letter: to making, to meaning, and to the enduring grace of things made by hand.
Photography courtesy of Dior