Feminist slogans on T-shirts are all very well, but has the creative director of the venerable French house really rewritten the rules of women’s fashion?
If you walked into Maria Grazia Chiuri’s office without knowing what she did for a living, you probably would not guess she’s a fashion designer. You might think, perhaps, that you had entered the study of an esteemed professor. Up here on the seventh floor of the Dior building in Paris, where the light from the Seine bounces off the zinc rooftops and takes on a chic silvery filter, there are no sketchbooks, no tape measure-draped mannequins, no bolts of taffeta or tweed. Instead, every inch of the imposing room is lined with books: philosophy, gender studies, art history, literature. The top shelves are accessed via a handsome ladder gliding along a gleaming brass rail. Were Netflix’s Emily in Paris to introduce a French intellectual with a private income and a subscription to World of Interiors, it would make for the ideal set.
Chiuri is much more interested in debating ideas than hemlines. There are other fashion designers with a similar mindset, but mostly they operate on the fringes of the industry, staging catwalk shows full of meaningfully asymmetric garments with challenging soundtracks to tiny niche audiences. Chiuri helms a luxury juggernaut of the highest order. A recent Dior catwalk show, held in Seville’s Plaza de España, featured 110 models, 40 flamenco dancers and a 60-piece live orchestra, and was viewed by 150 million people online.
