Seventy-eight years ago Christian Dior released his first fragrance, Miss Dior, the heady perfume named after his sister, a French resistance fighter who fought the Nazis, survived a concentration camp, and escaped. The history of the iconic perfume is now on display in Shanghai’s Fosun Foundation. The exhibition, Miss Dior: Stories of a Miss, surveys the legacy of the fragrance with immersive scenography by OMA. The architects, led by OMA partner Shohei Shigematsu, journeys through different themes and eras of Miss Dior, united by a pink landscape and Chinese cultural motifs.
The exhibition spans two floors, beginning with the ground floor where the Foundation’s operable facade is retracted to reveal the pink entry to the show. From there, OMA organized the exhibition’s 199 works across six different themed rooms.
Past the entry installation, where pink flooring and pink walls hold enlarged prints, the exhibition narrows into a tunnel. Rings, finished with LEDs displaying abstracted motifs of Miss Dior, loop around the walkway in the form of a ribbon, a nod to the bow on the perfume. Deeper into the exhibition, the rings gradually shrink and resemble traditional Chinese moon gates. Surrounded by mirrored walls to emphasize the ribbon’s effect, the tunnel acts as transportation into Miss Dior’s world.
While the tunnel feels contemporary, the next exhibition is not. The room, titled Miss Dior by Eva Jospin, riffs off the architecture of classical structures like the Villa Giulia in Rome. The domed ceiling is created using embroidered tapestries and printed fabrics by Jospin. The room, the only one not pink in the exhibition, holds two vitrines, featuring Raf Simons’s Passage 47 gown and another by Jospin.
The exhibition continues into Field of Flowers, a room dedicated to the floral notes found in the fragrance. The design of the space thus takes after flowers. Three types of fabric create undulating canopies reminiscent of petals and the ruffles of gowns. The canopy drops from the ceiling to carve out five niches, each holds a human-sized atomizer, shaped like a flower bud, that offer different floral notes found in the perfume. Above a 1949 Miss Dior dress at the room’s center, projections play footage of flower fields on top of the canopy, creating an effect of movement.
The journey then portals to the ’60s when Dior launched its first ready-to-wear line, also named Miss Dior. That history is on full display via a graphic, more contemporary treatment. The room is clad in plexiglass modules, an apt material choice that nods to the ubiquity of plastic during this time, which Dior’s logo reproduced at three different scales. The modules form a stage for 12 garments, illuminated by a spotlight concealed within the modules. Further away from the pieces and the corner of the room, the graphic logos get increasingly smaller.
Poppy pink then becomes a dreamy blush in the Miss Dior Dream. This room’s scenography is informed by Chinese rock gardens and traditional ink-wash paintings of mountains. Layers of frosted, pink gradient glass create peaks and valleys, like mountain ranges, to display gowns, artwork, and limited edition perfume. They’re surrounded by translucent fabric which hangs from the ceiling and walls clad in gradients of pink, created by applying white-to-clear film stickers over mirrors. The effect creates a visual fog over the room as seen in mountain paintings. It sets an ethereal stage for the works on display.
The last room makes a sharp departure from the hazy beauty of Miss Dior Dream. Instead, I Belong to Miss Dior situates itself in the matrix. One thousand one hundred fifteen perfume bottles, 3D printed in plastic, are displayed in floor-to-ceiling shelving which wraps the room and is illuminated in neon purple and pink LED light strips. The system is made of modular display units with a metallic pink surface behind it to reflect the lighting. A mirrored ceiling and floor make the display seem endless—much like the legacy of Miss Dior.
Miss Dior: Stories of a Miss is on view at the Fosun Foundation in Shanghai until October 8, 2025.