Corsets And Cool-Girl Cargo Pants: Everything You Need To Know About The Dior Show

Everyone’s talking about power at the moment. Soft power, its potential and its limits, in particular. It’s something that Maria Grazia Chiuri has always been interested in during her tenure at Dior, a woman’s autonomy and the part that clothes play in asserting that.

In her spring/summer 2023 collection, unveiled in Paris today in front of an audience that included Emma Raducanu, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Ramla Ali and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (the writer who birthed the line ‘We Should All Be Feminists’, which has been unofficially adopted as a rallying cry for Grazia Chiuri), she navigated this terrain once more.

Now, she was thinking about Catherine de Medici, the Italian noblewoman who arrived in the French court in 1533. An astute operator, Medici also made several sartorial innovations de mode; corsets, platform heels and Burano lace among them. Rather than treat them as archaic symbols of restraint, Grazia Chiuri employed a light touch to render them not only modern, but functional. Look at that unapologetic corsetry or those crinolines, their construction exposed, they felt more like a sweeping statement of intent than something cumbersome. How liberating.

An image of a Paris map – lifted from a 1950s scarf from the Dior archives – provided this season’s key print story. A formal documentation of a city, it is a reminder that the world around us is forever changing. This season’s Dior woman is ready to explore the now, and the next, with a sensitivity and awareness of the past. You don’t need a map to direct you to that conclusion, just look at the way she mixes the more ornate pieces from the collection with cool-girl cargo pants, slouchy denim and slinky vests.

The collection also played into Dior’s formidable artistic heritage. Around a folly (a reinterpretation of a reinterpretation) by the artist Eva Jospin, Dutch choreographers Imre and Marne van Opstal performed a surreal dance. A fitting medium for a house that designs for women who never stand still.