Homage Dior

The inspiration behind the painting.

Last year, the kids and I watched the Netflix series The New Look about Christian Dior.

I love fashion. It’s art you can wear! Especially couture — made from the most exquisite materials shaped into intricate structures and beautiful silhouettes. Though I love fashion, I am no fashionista. Jeans and a t-shirt are my uniform. I’m also a sucker for a good art history story. So when the series appeared, I was intrigued.

Before watching, I knew very little about Christian Dior beyond the basics. What I learned was layered and complex.

Dior built his fashion house during Nazi occupation. Moral compromise was everywhere. His sister, Catherine Dior, was imprisoned in a concentration camp for her work in the French Resistance. He navigated danger as a gay man in wartime Europe. He worked for designers who were dressing the wives of SS officers.

The series stayed with me for weeks. What struck me was not simply the beauty of the garments but the fact that he refused to abandon his vision. He drew at night. He continued refining silhouettes. He built something enduring in the middle of instability.

That perspective hit a nerve.

We do not get to choose the era we live in. Some periods feel steady. Others feel volatile. Dior’s was marked by occupation, war, and fear. And yet he continued to make his art.

Learning his story reminded me that artists have always worked inside history, not outside of it. I wanted to make something that would remind me of that truth.

The Painting

I began with research.

I combed through the Dior archives so I could study his drawings. I wanted to see his hand. After looking at dozens of sketches, I began noticing the repetition of a particular female figure that he returned to again and again. It felt like watching an idea circle him.

That became my starting point.

Homage Dior is oil on paper but it began as a collage of those archival drawings layered around his head. They hover in the background — barely visible, absorbed into the deep red ground.

From that field emerges one small luminous figure, perched on the tip of his pencil.

The fairy is not meant to be literal. She represents the spark that begins as an idea, grows into obsession, and eventually reaches a threshold. There is always a moment when the thinking must turn into action. When it’s time to stop circling and sit down — pen to paper, brush to canvas.

I know that feeling well.

My artist friends and I often talk about how difficult it feels to make work right now. How the world feels loud. How art can seem frivolous or small in the face of everything happening. But art does not disappear because times are tough. The proof is in museums.

History is rarely smooth sailing. People still get up in the morning and cook, raise children, bury their dead, build, design, paint, write, compose. Art is evidence of life lived. A painting is never just a painting. A garment is never just a garment. They are artifacts of conviction. They record what someone valued enough to sit down and shape it into form.

If we allow it, art history widens our perspective. It reminds us that we are not the first to live through instability. It also reminds us that the human response is to persevere. In dark periods all through human history, artists still found color, music, poetry, and beauty.

That matters.

We are living through a time that often feels unstable. It would be easy to suspend making until things feel steady — until I feel steady. But life does not pause. Mornings still come. Responsibilities remain. When I finally sit down and pick up the brush, it feels like quiet devotion to the work that insists on being made. Even if the world is loud. Even if I don’t feel like it.

Dior showed up.

This painting is my reminder to do the same.

Homage Dior is part of an ongoing body of portrait work exploring authority, reclamation, and the interior life of women standing inside pressure. You can view the larger inquiry here.

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LINDA CHIDO ART

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