When is a fashion brand not just a fashion brand? For Christian Dior, its multibillion-pound melting pot of access and power ensures that the mega-brand doesn’t merely sell luxury, but culture. Among the stadium-level spectacles and A-list front rows, the clothes are not always front and centre of the commentary. Straddling the worlds of design and showmanship is an interesting dichotomy for its creative director, Maria Grazia Chiuri, who joined the house (founded in 1947) in 2016.
The first female creative director in the brand’s 78-year history, the Italian designer, who cut her teeth at Fendi and Valentino, has led the charge of making female empowerment look good, transforming Dior from a bastion of old-school femininity into one of new-wave feminism. We meet in her library, bookshelves stacked with tomes spanning everything from English gardening to Greek philosophy. Plates of vibrant macarons look delicious, yet remain untouched. The view is of some of Paris’s most iconic sites, including the Grand Palais and the Musée D’Orsay, a reminder of Dior’s national significance.
Our interview is scheduled an hour after the surprise announcement that Gucci will be replacing its creative director, Sabato de Sarno – the latest in a whirlwind of industry movement. Chiuri, too, has been the subject of online chatter, with persistent rumours she’s parting ways with Dior. She won’t discuss it, because for the 62-year-old it’s business as usual, with two new collections to present in as many months. Still, the subject of sisterhood is never too far from Chiuri’s narrative; right off the bat, she’s reflecting on her position as a rare woman designing in top-tier fashion circles.
‘The reality is we’re living in a patriarchal society. It’s not just in fashion – for artists, for directors of other industries – it’s very difficult for women to achieve top positions,’ she says. ‘I try to give space to women by working with female photographers and artists. [In her first year Chiuri instigated a policy of using female photographers for all Dior’s commercial projects.] Over the years we’ve had great female designers – like [Coco] Chanel, [Madeleine] Vionnet, [Jeanne] Lanvin, [Elsa] Schiaparelli – who were not so celebrated. After World War II, there were more male designers. Now, there are incredible female designers, but not so many.’
Celebrating women has defined Chiuri’s somewhat radical approach. Over the past nine years, her muses have run the gamut from Catherine de Medici to the sculptor Niki de Saint Phalle. Chiuri collaborated with anthropologist Anne Grosfilley, an expert on African textiles, for her Marrakech show at El Badi Palace and the Chanakya School of Craft for 2023’s show in Mumbai. She recruited female Mexican rodeo riders to pay homage to the daredevil escaramuzas and the Israeli feminist choreographer Sharon Eyal to lead a modern dance troupe in 2018.
So perhaps it’s no surprise that Chiuri grew up in a matriarchal, working class household – her mother was a seamstress, her father was in the military – surrounded by women from different backgrounds. ‘My grandmother is from south Italy and I remember spending time there in the holidays. I was under the table making embroideries and the other women would just talk.’ She credits her first job at Fendi – and working with the five Fendi sisters, ‘le sorelle’ – for instilling a sense of community at work. ‘I define myself as a community designer and, for me, the studio and the atelier is about teamwork. We share ideas, we come together.’
This lack of ego is just one characteristic that sets Chiuri apart. She’s the antithesis of flamboyant – a hand-shaker, as opposed to an air-kisser. I’ve only ever seen her in black, with the exception of a magpie scattering of gold rings and trinkets; today she’s wearing an oversized black sweater and Adidas wide-leg track pants, her ‘show day’ power eyeliner stripped back. She hates that the hours of research and craftsmanship that go into a new design are now distilled into a single image viewed online. A mother-of-two, she despairs at the age-old idea that if you have children, you can’t possibly excel at your work. ‘Sometimes, women in politics have to renounce their personal life because they aren’t believable,’ she says. ‘There’s absolutely no right – women, and men, can have different aspects to themselves and can do different things – but it’s difficult to change this narrative.’ Chiuri would rather debate feminist theories than what makes a bag go viral on TikTok and believes that even something special should be comfortable to wear; her designs are always rooted in practicality. You sense her happy place is in the studio surrounded by the design team, rather than schmoozing with her star-studded front row. After 40 years working in fashion, is she nostalgic for a simpler time?
‘I am lucky because I’ve worked in fashion for a long time. It’s more difficult for the next generation,’ she says. ‘Fashion used to be about family companies and there were small audiences – clients and buyers. Now fashion is like a channel. It’s something more popular, it’s like pop. It’s a form of media. But I am interested in it, it allows us to understand our time.’ Few harness the power of media quite like Dior, whose live-streamed runway shows can garner millions of views. There’s worldwide exhibitions to sponsor and new stores to open. When not hosting megawatt catwalk shows around the world (this year will see Chiuri present at least two international collections, in Kyoto and Rome), Dior is dressing its A-list ambassadors, including Anya Taylor-Joy, Jennifer Lawrence and Jenna Ortega. Last summer’s Olympics in Paris saw the brand raise the fashion stakes for the sporting event, emerging as the surprise dressmaker to the opening ceremony’s superstars, including Aya Nakamura, Lady Gaga and Celine Dion. ‘I was very happy to meet Celine. It was magnificent. The notoriety of the event meant there was a lot of stress – it was a long process. We had never done so many celebrities in such a short period of time, in the same place, in a city that was closed,’ she laughs. ‘They invited me, but I said, “No, I want to sit at home and watch it on my TV.” I was completely destroyed.’
According to a report from Launchmetrics measuring media impact value (MIV) during the event, Dior scooped gold, attracting $53m in MIV throughout the games. While impressive, it’s unlikely to mean much to Chiuri. ‘Social media doesn’t interest me. It’s an important thing, but it’s not the part I really like,’ she says. ‘Social media started with this idea of freedom, but... it’s not so true. If you use your voice, you need to reflect on what you say. It can be really aggressive and the risk is to be very superficial. There are many different aspects that simplify things – there is no context and the reality is more complex,’ she says.
She may be entrenched in the most French of establishments, but Chiuri remains charmingly Italian in spirit; her Roman-accented English is occasionally corrected by her daughter, Rachele Regini, who is Dior’s cultural advisor and has dialled in via video call. Chiuri’s husband, Paolo Regini, a bespoke shirtmaker, lives in Rome, with Chiuri travelling back most weekends. She relishes the international set-up – working in France has allowed her to approach fashion design with another point of view. ‘I am really happy with the nine years I have been at Dior. It was very important for me to move to a different country to experience work, because the relationship between fashion and culture is very different,’ she says. ‘In Italy, the approach in fashion is very close to the idea of industry and creativity working together to realise something more democratic. In Versailles, fashion was born to impress; it was to show the power of the court.’ Chiuri’s own approach to design has always been to combine creativity with func- tion, a strategy that has won her eye-watering commercial kudos. ‘I really believe in the product. My approach is the day jacket, the day coat, the day pant – that is very Italian. It’s not the idea of being so theatrical and cinematic. But the beauty of fashion is that there are different approaches.’
This level of pragmatism lends itself to masterminding a sell-out accessory, an area in which Chiuri has form. Part of the team who created the iconic Baguette bag at Fendi in the ’90s (often touted as the world’s first It bag, thanks to its near weekly product placement in Sex And The City), alongside her creative partner Pierpaolo Piccioli, she revitalised Valentino in the 2000s, with the iconic Rockstud range. A student at the Istituto Europeo di Design in Rome, her love of accessory design flourished from a young age. ‘At school, nobody wanted to work in accessories. It was considered less important. People looked at me like I was crazy,’ she recalls. ‘Accessories were my obsession from the beginning – shoes and bags. My first job was shoes. My first three jobs were shoes. When I was young, I made handmade bags at home; I was born an accessory designer.’ Her tenure at Dior also reads like a greatest handbag hits. She’s excited about the new Toujours style, a squishy, everyday bag top- stitched with the instantly recognisable cannage (canework) motif of the brand’s bestselling Lady Dior – and is particularly proud of the brand’s now-signature Book Tote. The capacious, structured tote, engineered from a single piece of fully-embroidered, mono- grammed fabric, was created specifically to carry books (Chiuri’s preferred form of entertainment when travelling ) and can transport a laptop or even a change of clothes. It’s been a home-run worldwide.
Perhaps its success speaks to the fact that Chiuri has a deep understanding of the needs of a woman of today and tomorrow – her own time-poor, high-stress lifestyle is some- thing most of us can relate to. ‘With this kind of life, it’s very difficult to think about my wardrobe. I have no time and I try to have as little a wardrobe as possible – just the basics I can use everywhere.’ It means her approach to designing the perfect pair of trousers or tailored jacket must really work. ‘[Fashion] is no longer just for the big event, we dress the people who are also going to work.’ If she’s tired by the pace or pressure, it doesn’t show. ‘I love what I do. Fashion is my life.’ And with that, it’s back to the atelier.