‘Whoo! Whoo! Whoo! Whoo!’ some 21 models chant backstage, the napes of their necks framed by U-shaped, Frida Kahlo-esque braids, each decorated with a single gold butterfly clip suspended in the centre. As the women dance and jump around Maria Grazia Chiuri, it looks like the designer is surrounded by a flight of monarchs breaking free of their cocoons.
Watching Chiuri with the cast of her cruise 2024 show in Mexico, I get the sense that this is a woman having the last laugh. Between ambitious, critically acclaimed destination shows spanning Mumbai and Mexico City, the year has felt like an ultimate triumph, a masterful flex for the creative director whose time at Dior has been a standout success story.
She’s that rare designer whose clothes can strike the balance between wearability – an easy prairie skirt, say, or crisp shirt with just the right amount of slouch – and intellectualism (Chiuri is a voracious reader who imbues her work with wide-ranging cultural references from Judy Chicago to Simone de Beauvoir). She’s reached that Holy Grail position between (wildly successful) profitability and critical acclaim. The New York Times critic Vanessa Friedman recently described Chiuri as, ‘the most subversively political, even radical, designer in charge of a big French fashion brand’.
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But positive press wasn’t always a given. Like most women in highly visible boss roles, Chiuri has had to deal with detractors and dismissive labels. Sitting at the helm of a luxury behemoth such as Dior, in an industry built on the idea of hierarchy – and whose creative stars have historically been men – added a layer of complication.
When she took the job in 2016, to no small amount of media noise about her being the first woman creative director in the 75-year history of the house, she had mixed feelings about the fanfare.
‘Everybody started to say I was the first woman [to be creative director]. But I never thought about my being a woman in this way. Why were they only speaking about that?’ Chiuri says, in a Zoom chat from her office in Paris several weeks after the show in Mexico. She looks relaxed, her trademark blonde hair now dark brown, as she sits at a large table next to a vase of hydrangeas and a jug of water, in front of a sprawling wall of books. She describes how the phrase ‘the first’ became loaded with subtext over time. As someone who is ‘a first’ myself (in my case, the first Black woman to edit ELLE), I can relate.
‘I immediately began to understand that underneath this sentence there were some doubts about my capacity. Like, the idea of being “the first” as being unusual,’ she says. ‘I think there were many different meanings behind this sentence. I know the fashion system and I grew up in the fashion system. And I know the idea of a genius is more often seen as a man. In some way, I think I use my work to answer this voice that was so strong – to replace that idea.’
Throughout our time together, Chiuri talks about how she has sought to ‘change the narrative’ around her own story, but also the story of women at large. ‘Because that’s the point,’ she says.
From her first Dior collection in 2016, a controversial debut that was inspired by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s seminal essay We Should All Be Feminists (its opening look had a simple white T-shirt emblazoned with the title), Chiuri has used her clothing to make statements about women’s equality, draw attention to the art of other women and, increasingly, centre communities of artisans from countries far removed from the Western fashion capitals, creating a more inclusive picture of high fashion. And throughout it all, she has been regarded as too political, too commercial or too academic (sometimes all three). That slogan T-shirt? The critics baulked. But its simplicity was the point. ‘It had to be done in a way people could understand.’
She has been unwavering in her commitment to modernising the female gaze ever since (Dior has become one of fashion’s most profitable brands since 2017, with revenues reportedly reaching €7bn).
‘When I started at Dior as a creative director in a company with so big a history and one that embodies this idea of femininity – for me, the starting point was that I wanted to think about this in a different way. But who could help me? The argument is so complex. From the beginning, I knew that I could not only give my point of view,’ she says in her trademark Roman accent. So she set about approaching a range of artists and authors ‘from different experiences and different backgrounds’ to help fill the gaps.
Chiuri says her motivation was partly personal. She’s open about the reality that she is a woman of a certain generation from a homogenous community. ‘The first woman I have to educate is myself. My background is Italian. I grew up with the references that are Greek and Roman. So the idea of beauty, the idea of a body that I was surrounded by, was the Roman and Greek statue. That was the starting point: to meet other women to understand this conversation around the world. Because it is not simple for people like my generation who weren’t educated in this sense, we had a lot of stereotypical ideas in our mind.’
To understand the Chiuri of now, you have to rewind back to her childhood in Rome, where she was born and raised by a seamstress mother and a father who was in the military. She says her early experiences of museums filled with the work of the Great Masters will never leave her: ‘All around me there were no women artists. In school we studied art for four years, five years, and all the important paintings were by men,’ she says. This had an indelible impact on her. The most obvious example of this is her SS18 collection, which was inspired by the late art critic Linda Nochlin’s essay, Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? (a title that was on another controversial T-shirt). ‘In truth, there is a lot of my personal story in my work,’ she says. ‘I think that my work was reaction. Also, when there was criticism about my being more political – I don’t think that creativity is a new dress. The creativity is the work that you are doing in communities. The process that you try to change.’
When she began her career, she was struck by fashion’s gender gap. ‘This industry was very small. I worked at Fendi, a company where there were five [Fendi] sisters. But the creative director was Karl Lagerfeld. Really, Fendi was incredible teamwork. The person on stage was Karl Lagerfeld, but all the family worked really hard. And when you look back at the 80s, the most famous designers were men, like Giorgio Armani, Gianfranco Ferré, Valentino Garavani. So, in the imagination, the creative director is a man.’ She says it’s the same with the photographers. ‘When I joined Dior, I only wanted to shoot with women photographers. And everybody said, “Oh, there are not many women photographers.” This is not true.’
Now, Chiuri’s Dior involves a global network of women image-makers, artisans, artists and designers, such as Joana Vasconcelos, who created a dream-like, large-scale installation of woven sculptures for her AW23 show.
Her cruise presentations have become a vehicle through which to grow her creative community. At her cruise 2020 show in Marrakech, she enlisted artists and designers from across the diaspora, including Mickalene Thomas, now a frequent collaborator, and Grace Wales Bonner. Meanwhile, her Mumbai show spotlighted the work of her long-time creative partner Karishma Swali, of Chanakya International and the Chanakya School of Craft, which provides hand-embroideries to a range of luxury houses including Dior and Fendi. In Mexico, where she revealed one of her most beautiful collections to date, the Frida Kahlo-inspired show ended with a performance by Elina Chauvet, the Mexican feminist artist.
And what connected them all was Chiuri’s modern vision of femininity. ‘Sometimes there is this idea that fashion is a dress, a jacket,’ she says. ‘I think fashion is something more. And we have to use that creativity to change the way we make and see fashion today.’
Kenya Hunt is the Editor-in-Chief of ELLE UK. Her career spans working for some of the world's most influential women’s titles on both sides of the Atlantic from her post-graduate days as an Assistant Editor at the seminal magazine, Jane, to her time as Deputy Editor of Grazia UK and ELLE UK. As the founder of R.O.O.M. Mentoring, she advocates for greater diversity within the fashion industry by providing a supportive network for some of the many talented aspiring designers, journalists and image makers of colour London has to offer. In 2021, she was recognised by The British Fashion Council for her work and given a Global Leader Of Change Award at its annual Fashion Awards. An American based in London, she lives south of the river with her husband and two sons. Her critically-acclaimed book, Girl: Essays on Black Womanhood (HarperCollins/HQ), is out now.
