Maria Grazia Chiuri, the artistic director of womenswear at the fashion house Dior, has an office with a postcard view of Paris, with the Eiffel Tower and the dome of the Invalides both silhouetted against a suitably Dior-gray sky on the day we meet. This is a particular shade of dove-gray that the house’s founder, Christian Dior, made his trademark in 1947, alongside curvaceous, corseted figures and sweeping ball gowns. There are plenty of images of it floating around the halls of Dior—including, of course, the “Tailleur Bar,” a black-and-white suit with a fitted skirt from Dior’s first collection that earned its debut the nickname “The New Look.” The hourglass bar jacket is still seen—and sold—as an archetypal Dior silhouette today.
Chiuri doesn’t wear bar clothes – although since taking the helm at Dior in 2016, she has redesigned the jacket in her own image, using stretch and knit to gently hug the waist rather than aggressively pack. It appeared alongside famous T-shirts bearing feminist slogans; the first from her debut collection read “We Should All Be Feminists,” taken from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s book of the same name. Almost a decade later, it is still for sale on the Dior website.
Today she’s wearing what I often see her wearing backstage at her shows: jeans, a black silk blouse and a straight-cut black blazer. Of course, her hands are laden with extravagant rings that recall her Roman origins – Chiuri was born in this city in 1964 and still calls it home, commuting back and forth between Paris. But the rest of her look is uniform. “Absolutely,” she admits. “Because if I’m not wearing a uniform, I can’t work. I want to focus on my work, not on myself.”
The work that Chiuri focuses on is haute couture. Haute couture represents bespoke clothing made to order for an elite clientele. For Dior, one of only a handful of houses that produce this type of clothing, it is a sign of distinction. According to Erwan Rambourg, global head of consumer and retail research at HSBC, Dior Couture generated sales of 9.5 billion euros in 2023, up from 8.6 billion euros in 2022. By the end of the year, sales are estimated at 9.9 billion euros.
Brands are notoriously cautious about the prices of their couture clothes, following the motto “if you have to ask, you can’t afford it,” but prices are usually in the tens of thousands or more. When many pieces are priced at the equivalent of works of art, perhaps that’s appropriate: couture is considered the Formula One of fashion, the highest expression of creativity – a piece of haute couture from Dior or Chanel is the closest thing to a Picasso.
In the couture workrooms, which are still in the Private hotel on Avenue Montaigne, where Dior founded the house in 1946, an entourage of collaborators work to make Chiuri’s ideas a reality. The place hums and buzzes with activity—albeit quietly. Haute couture is made almost entirely by hand, so there are no whirring sewing machines. Pleats are sewn into place while an intricate black velvet and lace dress (newly ordered but originally shown in Chiuri’s fall/winter 2022 couture collection) is jaggedly cut along the pattern of the lace, so that when sewn together, the seams appear magically invisible. Two wedding dresses are medium-length, featherweight in tulle. There are Dior’s signature corsets, but they are lightly reinforced and flexible, allowing the body to move easily.
“The fantasy must be an accessible fantasy,” says Chiuri of her approach to couture – the dream laboratory of fashion. “I don’t like effects (just) for the sake of effects. Especially at a time when everyone is pushing me…” – she pauses and hastily corrects herself. “In the past, not here of course,” before continuing – “… thinking more about the image on Instagram, less about a dialogue with the real people. An image is an image. It is an image. When people look at Dior in an image, it is the photographer’s view that they perceive, not the reality of the clothes. And when they see the real clothes, they sometimes surprise them.”
I visit one of Dior’s flea Ateliers. Couture houses have two different kinds of workspace, some dedicated exclusively to tailoring, others to that evocative word. It means soft or flowing, and can mean anything, like the draped evening gowns that made up the bulk of Chiuri’s fall/winter 24 couture show in June. For Chiuri, these had an indirect connection to sport—perhaps because she was simultaneously designing kit for France’s female athletes for the Olympics, which she began just weeks after we met. “Fashion speaks of the present,” Chiuri argues pragmatically. So she dressed her women not in backwards ballgowns or tailored suits, but in dresses that looked and felt as comfortable as T-shirts. Fittingly, these resembled ancient Greek chitons, sometimes with a practical Chiuri-style blazer over the top. Their quiet appeal to women is easy to see.
Still, some complain about Chiuri’s whisper couture—that it lacks impact, that haute couture should be a spectacle. Especially on social media, amateur critics can be scathing. She is not deaf to it. “I think all fashion shows are performances, but there are different ‘languages’ to make a performance,” she argues. “In Italy, the idea of haute couture is totally different because it is closer to the idea that you are in contact with an individual client.” She pauses. “I remember that because I worked with Valentino for a long time. He had a personal relationship with his couture clients. He became her friend.” Chiuri is referring to Valentino Garavani, the man she worked with for nine years before becoming co-creative director of his eponymous label with Pierpaolo Piccioli in 2008, a position she remained until her job at Dior.
Hence Chiuri’s very gentle approach to the house – which, she admits, is the opposite of one of her most famous predecessors, John Galliano. “At the beginning, it was also criticized in a way,” she says of her approach. “If you think of Dior: when he started, the profile of couture was closer to the Valentino generation. Less to the social media generation. I do what I consider to be my ‘language’. But sometimes it is very difficult to explain to other people that all ‘languages’ are beautiful.”
Incidentally, the Dior ateliers are not the only ones working on Chiuri’s creations: one customer has ordered a replica of a Christian Dior design from 1955, a red dress called Écarlate. A twin of the original is in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum. Recreating museum-quality clothing to measure is the privilege of haute couture clientele (though Chiuri’s design studio must approve any reissue from the archive before it is made). The dress seems eons removed from Chiuri’s supple designs, so solid that it practically stands alone.
In fact, Chiuri’s clothes and ethos are more similar in spirit to those of Madeleine Vionnet, a designer whose curvaceous outfits defined the 1930s – and whose influence quickly swept Dior out of fashion. While he described himself as an architect who “built” clothes, Vionnet explained that her goal was to dress a body, not construct a dress. “That’s the central aspect of my work,” says Chiuri. “The idea of many designers is to design an outfit – and they don’t think about the relationship between the body and the outfit. I start with an idea of how the body can stay healthy in this art. It’s a completely different process.”
Of course, gender plays a role in this too. Chiuri is the first female creative director at Dior and is committed to empowering women – supporting not just customers but also artists and artisans through her designs. She has worked with groups of local artisans from Africa to Mexico and across Scotland, as well as the ateliers at Dior. The couture show in June was shown alongside a selection of works by artist Faith Ringgold, who died before the project was completed. Her works were embroidered by the Chanakya School of Craft in India – a school for women, although embroidery has traditionally been a male-dominated industry in this country. Chiuri also states that embroidery itself is devalued. “When we think about fashion, we talk all the time about cuts, the silhouette, (but) textiles and embroidery are not part of the project,” she says. “Like a second choice.” She suspects this is because embroidery is seen as a female occupation, “like housework.”
Chiuri gets a little annoyed at the denigration of female endeavours, female craftswomen and artists. “I get so nervous when someone calls the artists’ work ‘scenography.’ It’s not scenography.” She pauses. “I think there’s prejudice.” That may be true of female designers too. “They don’t recognise women in art in general, and it’s the same with designers. And so any element you use, if it’s in any way in that (female) narrative, diminishes the value of your work. The geniuses are only men, we must not forget that.” She laughs, although she’s obviously serious. “When I started at Dior, there was immediately a big outcry: ‘Oh, you’re a political designer.’ Just because I want to talk about feminism, that was my point of view.”
Chiuri sees fighting prejudice as part of her role. “Everything is political. Fashion is very political from the beginning,” she explains. “Behind the clothes lies the history of humanity. I love this work, which is in a way anthropological, to understand the past and also to learn from it. And to reflect, to understand more about the future.” For Chiuri, that future is female – both in terms of her clients and the communities of women she works with. “It’s important to understand that I’m doing this work for other women.”
