NEW YORK — A few days before she staged her Fall 2024 show in the Brooklyn Museum for nearly 900 guests on Monday evening, Dior’s creative director Maria Grazia Chiuri was lounging on a sofa in an anonymous office building in Midtown Manhattan, wearing a fuzzy gray sweater, swishy green cargo pants and Nikes. She finished a coffee, then, when another was placed before her, accepted it. “Okay! Why not!” She talked about blowing off a fitting to serenade the pop star Rosalia. She talked about how great her daughter, Rachele Regini, looks in her old clothes, and how she still feels 18.
For Chiuri, “pleasure. I think, is very important.”
Chiuri, who has been at Dior since 2016, spent her first two days in New York going to the Brooklyn Artists Ball, which Dior has sponsored since last year, and then to Angel Orensanz’s Badass Women Art Awards, where she was an honoree. “I saw a lot of the beautiful people — musicians, artists, curators,” she said, her voice, as it often does, cascading into a pleasing growl. “Today we start working — or, yesterday.”
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It’s a laissez-faire schedule for the woman in charge of one of the world’s biggest brands, but Chiuri, 60, is a center of stability in an industry that disposes of luxury designers as quickly as fast fashion brands churn out their knockoffs. (Just last month, her longtime design partner Pierpaolo Piccioli, with whom she worked at Valentino for nearly two decades, departed from the Italian house and was promptly replaced.)
Chiuri is one of fashion’s most perplexing figures: Christian Dior is known for its backward-looking silhouettes, especially the post-World War II New Look, which, with its corseted waist and full skirt, is basically the tradwife’s answer to a power suit.
Her designs are hardly radical. She has created a globally appealing uniform of conservative prettiness that was a keystone of LVMH’s 14 percent revenue growth in fashion and leather goods last year — or at least, the news release pointed out, she, along with menswear director Kim Jones, has “reinvented the magic of the Dior name, season after season.” Every New Look is new again!
And yet coupled with her creative austerity is a spirit of disruption. Most luxury brands source their embroideries and other textiles from India but rarely admit it, instead preferring a fairy tale of superior European craftsmanship. Chiuri has put Indian craftsmanship at the center of what she does, forging a very public partnership with Karishma Swali, whose Mumbai-based atelier Chanakya International is one such provider of artisanal materials to fashion houses, and who also founded a school that teaches women traditional and newer crafts, which Chiuri and Dior help support.
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She has also softened the previously precious line between fashion and art, though whether this has increased public respect for fashion is difficult to say. Art is simply less choosy than it used to be, and more comfortable in its commoditization. A 2021 Dior retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum was beefy enough to raise eyebrows at the more renowned Metropolitan Museum of Art with its Costume Institute, sure, but also expected pop fare at a museum that mounted a critically panned cancellation-themed Picasso show curated by a Netflix comedian.
In short, she has made the most traditionalist women’s uniform seem like the silhouette of change. Most of the fashion world’s best instigators are women: Hillary Taymour of Collina Strada, Gabriela Hearst and Marine Serre with their focus on sustainability; Miuccia Prada with her recontextualization of what fashion symbolizes; Rei Kawakubo and Simone Rocha with their reframing of femininity; even Tory Burch with her midcareer switch-up from Palm Beach hostess to self-determined cool.
Chiuri is modest, even a deflector. She doesn’t talk like a revolutionary. Why are women more adept at change in fashion? Chiuri demurred, saying this is the medium’s history. “It’s very complicated. If we can speak about another brand, Madame Chanel created the modern woman,” she said. And while there were a number of female designers working at that time, like Madame Grès and Madeleine Vionnet, “there was this idea that the male designer was closer with the idea of the artist. It’s like a chef, versus a cook. But this is a very patriarchal idea.”
For the show on Monday evening, seemingly every blond celebrity was assembled into a wall of glowing bleach: Naomi Watts and her daughter Kai Schreiber, Rosamund Pike, Charlize Theron, Diane Kruger, Michelle Williams (and her equally blond stylist, Kate Young) and Anya Taylor-Joy.
But the real eye candy at these events is the clients. If you buy a bag, you’re a shopper; if you spend upward of hundreds of thousands of dollars per year, you’re a client, and that can earn you a ticket to a fashion show. Mothers bring teenage daughters. Wives bring self-conscious-looking husbands. Jewelry arrives with security guards: one woman, wearing three strands of diamonds around her neck, had two beefy suit types flanking her. Very few of them are extraordinary dressers, but they are a window into the shared style of the 21st century elite: lacy and fitted and highly glossed. Quiet luxury is, for this breed of advanced consumer, hardly interesting.
The show gave them much to choose from. What ties these traveling shows to their destinations — or to their moments, or even their season, or even their source material — is always a loose thing. Chiuri is, lately, exploring the difference between couture and ready-to-wear, which is indeed nifty intellectual fodder until you consider a ready-to-wear Dior jacket is $5,000. The theme is incidental; the party, the flow of champagne, the buttering up of the clients with the feeling that they’re in the most important place in the world because sitting across a flank of famous faces, is what matters. (In fact, the runway is so not-what-matters that images of this collection were already released and reviewed on Vogue Runway in December.)
Chiuri found Dior’s connection to New York through Marlene Dietrich, an early and eager Dior patron. With a bit of pretty gnarly streetwear sprinkled in, Chiuri’s collection swanned through a stiffened version of Dietrich’s mix of men’s tailoring and womanly glamour. There was a tomboyish flair, to be sure: models with short, slicked back hair; mostly kitten heels and flats; a woman in a leather flight suit; another in a pilot jacket.
But Dietrich was so appealing because she veered between looks — a naked dress here, a men’s suit there — with a precision that created a sense of dominance, of power. Chiuri’s clothes are precise, but it’s clear their power comes not from within, but from the associations the designer has put on them in her work centering international craftsmanship and feminist art.
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Can the New Look ever escape the patriarchy? Even Dietrich seemed to be drawn to it for nostalgic meaning. “It wasn’t really a New Look at all, but rather the last gasp of a vanishing female who had held sway in the western world for four hundred years,” Marian Folwer wrote in her book “The Way She Looks Tonight.” “Dior’s New Look was the Last Look at really ladylike clothes before mods, minis, almost-naked full-frontal fashions and other aberrations took over.”
Power is not a word that sits easily with Chiuri. Now she sits at the head of an atelier that can make an exquisite dress in a matter of hours. Does it make her feel powerful? “Powerful, no,” she said patly. “It’s normal.” More than power, she said, she knows the right people. She has worked with Swali’s business since 1992, for example, and knows the Italian factories in and out, and now, since working with Dior, the French ones, too. “It’s about the relationship,” she said. “That you are honest, precise — I think this is very important. They trust me because I have never asked them to do something that was impossible to realize.”
Some folks look to fashion to do the impossible, though, and they carp that Chiuri’s designs are too boring. They’re actually very beautiful in person, and on buyers — excuse me, clients. But they are emblematic of a time when designers push things forward not with ideas, but statements.
The most intriguing clothes in the show were not the Dietrich-does-Dior looks, but dresses and sultry men’s pajamas at the end covered in spangles and fringes, dancing under the runway lights, that emphasized the shoulders and a narrow hip. One model, in a dark red velvet dress with an open back that scooped down to the middle of her back, even had the right walk, her shoulders and hips moving like the wheels of an express train — the way Dietrich first captured America’s attention in Josef von Sternberg in “The Blue Angel.”
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Those were the dresses the actress wore when she was first constructing her persona: a breed of glamour that would allow her an irreverent remove from the unsparing machine of fame. Those dresses, more than the mannish suits, looked very, very powerful.
