Inside Dior's Surrealist Masked Ball

For Christian Dior’s spring 2018 haute couture show, Artistic Director Maria Grazia Chiuri took inspiration from the original surrealists, such as Leonor Fini, in the form of black and white dresses and masked and temporary tattooed models. Just hours after the fabulous show took place inside the Musée Rodin, the space transformed from runway to surrealist playground for its masked ball. The brand decked out one of the main rooms with huge hanging plaster sculptures of eyes, noses, ears, mouths and bare torsos, as a tribute to the visual disembodiment loved by the surrealists for the show and party. The façade of the museum had a video and sound installation projected onto it—with an eye shifting into the shape of a bird.

This event followed Dior’s masked ball last year, during couture week in Paris last January, and of course there were a slew of celebs there: Bella Hadid, Winnie Harlow, Jeanne Damas, and Alexa Chung were just a few who attended, and Willow Smith gave a killer performance. Guests spent the night taking selfies with a row of guards dressed as chess pieces, women in head-to-toe beige spandex outfits, performers wearing candelabras and decks of cards on their heads, and Go-go style dancers wearing 3D uniforms mimicking playing cards. And for those who didn’t bring a mask to the masked ball, cloud printed Stephen Jones masks (the milliner also crafted the same masks that appeared in the couture show earlier that day) were handed out and they just happened to match the cloud printed outfits and faces of the men pouring endless champagne.