How Maria Grazia Chiuri brought feminism to the House of Dior

Maria Grazia Chiuri

If fashion houses were run by committee, the latest iteration of Dior would probably never have made it to the runway. Imagine the pitch: Let’s take one of the world’s largest luxury brands and tweak it so that, where it was once known as the most demurely feminine of houses, it is now the most outspokenly feminist. How about bandolier bags and revolutionary berets? How about making striped marinière shirts that say WHY HAVE THERE BEEN NO GREAT WOMEN ARTISTS? and then handing out the art historian Linda Nochlin’s 1971 essay of the same name to guests at a show? Great idea, huh? Many people would have thought not, but according to Maria Grazia Chiuri, the first and only female creative director in Dior’s 71-year history, the transformation was a no-brainer.

“When I arrived, everybody said to me, ‘Oh, Dior—Dior is a feminine brand,’ ” she recalled when we recently met in Paris. “Honestly, I said, ‘Okay, but I think we can find something more than a flower.’ This traditional idea of ‘feminine’ was, for me, just a little bit too old, and so I say, ‘I completely agree with this value, but we have to speak about women today.’ ”

It was this philosophy that led W to pair the Italian feminist artist Libera Mazzoleni with Chiuri for this story. Mazzoleni, who was born in Milan in 1949, has spent decades exploring the female form and female sexuality. “I searched for news on Maria Grazia and read two interviews she gave about the fashion world, the female condition, the contradictions of existing,” Mazzoleni said. “The acuteness of her analysis and her intelligent humanity deeply impressed me.” After a meeting during the haute couture collections, Mazzoleni and Chiuri got together at Paris’s Quartier Général studios. It was sweltering July-in-Paris-with-no-air-conditioning weather, but Chiuri looked thrilled, even wearing a wool sweater, to be in front of Mazzoleni’s lens. ­Mazzoleni then shared the images with the writer Graziella Longoni, who wrote captions for them, uniting reality and myth, image and text.

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