What does it mean when a fashion House steps into a photography exhibition? When it’s Dior, a maison fluent in the language of iconography, the answer is never superficial. This month, it lends its support to Graciela Iturbide, one of Mexico’s most revered photographers, whose first major retrospective in Japan opens at the Kyoto City Museum as part of Kyotographie 2025. A showcase of work that spans six decades, it’s an exhibition of Iturbide's portraits that resists spectacle in favour of clarity, intimacy, and truth.
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If this moment feels particularly poetic, it’s because it is. Dior’s relationship with Japan began in the fifties, when Christian Dior became the first French couturier to present a collection there in 1953. In the years that followed, silhouettes like Tokio, Jardin Japonais, and Outamoro gestured to an East-meets-West reverence. Romanticised? Yes, but never trivialised.
Fast forward to today, and Dior's artistic director Maria Grazia Chiuri continues that legacy by drawing connections between craft, feminism, and community, most recently through the Fall 2025 show held in Kyoto, Japan.
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Iturbide’s inclusion is a natural fit. Born in Mexico City in 1942, the photographer has spent her life documenting what others overlook: Zapotec women in Juchitán, muxes in Oaxaca, desert rituals in Sonora. Her images are stark but never cold; poetic without sentimentality. They are, as Chiuri herself might describe, expressions of lived feminism.
In 1989, Iturbide published Juchitán de las Mujeres, a pivotal work that continues to shape feminist discourse in Latin American visual culture. And in 2018, Dior tapped her to shoot a special reportage in Oaxaca for its Spring 2024 collection, a creative partnership later immortalised in the Her Dior anthology.
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The retrospective in Kyoto, part of Kyotographie’s 13-artist lineup exploring love, empathy, and resilienc, is a quiet triumph. In a festival that seeks to map humanity through photography, Iturbide’s voice is essential. Her black-and-white work doesn’t just show us women; it asks how we see them. Her camera moves with the gaze of someone both insider and outsider, activist and artist. She makes room for contradictions: strength and softness, ritual and rupture, stillness and defiance.
At a time when luxury brands often shout to be heard, Dior’s move in Kyoto is a study in quiet power. No logos, no runway, just reverence for an artist, a cause, and a legacy that transcends borders. After all, as Iturbide’s lens has taught us time and again, the real beauty lies not in spectacle, but in what remains when the noise clears.
Graciela Iturbide’s exhibition takes place at Kyoto City Museum, from now till 11 May 2025. For more information about Kyotographie 2025, visit their website.