The tenure of Dior’s first female designer, Maria Grazia Chiuri, formally came to an end on Thursday with an announcement that she was leaving the brand after nine years. It had been rumored for months, so it surprised no one. Really it had ended two days before in Rome, with a cruise show. One that encapsulated all she had brought to the house. Even if she didn’t admit it, she clearly had designed it that way.
It’s one way to have the last word.
Indeed, the fog that drifted in over the manicured lawns of the Villa Albani Torlonia in Rome just as the show began lent what was already a surreal moment an extra-otherworldly air.
Ms. Chiuri had requested that all of the female guests wear white, even Natalie Portman and Rosamund Pike; the men, black. As they entered the verdant inner courtyard of the private manse, with its collection of Greco-Roman antiquities, they walked past dancers posed like moving statuary. When the first models appeared, to the strains of a live orchestra, light rain began to fall.
Along with the mist, it made the clothes, almost all ivory and often so light as to be practically transparent, seem ghostly (even for someone like me, watching through the computer screen): an ethereal stew of references in lace, silk and velvet — with the occasional tailcoat — to different periods in history and imagination.
In a video call before the show, Ms. Chiuri said she had been after what she called “beautiful confusion,” the phrase the screenwriter Ennio Flaiano originally suggested as a title for Fellini’s “8½.” It was an apt description, not just of the collection itself, which seemed made for phantoms slipping from one era into the next, but also of what was then a question mark surrounding her own position.
Ms. Chiuri had nominally brought Dior back to her home city to celebrate the romantic spirits that formed her (and helped shape fashion), from La Cinecittà to the director Pier Paolo Pasolini and Mimì Pecci-Blunt, an early 20th-century patroness of the arts who had built a private theater Ms. Chuiri recently restored. But she also brought herself and her audience full circle, back to the place she began.
To do so, she enlisted a host of collaborators: the Tirelli costume house, the director Matteo Garrone (who made a short film in honor of the collection), the artist Pietro Ruffo, the Dutch choreographers Imre and Marne van Opstal. If that sounds like a lot to cram into what was essentially a 20-minute fashion experience, it was on purpose. At that point, no one was admitting that she was about to leave — not even her. When asked directly, Ms. Chiuri had simply said, “Oh, I don’t answer this question.”
Now everyone knows the answer.
Still, it’s too bad no one had been willing to acknowledge it sooner. Because the lack of clarity about Ms Chiuri’s future, combined with the actual fog, merely gave an ambiguous edge to what could have been a triumphant farewell. Turned it into a vaguely elegiac swan song.
Maybe Ms. Chiuri, who has the thick skin and stubbornness of many pioneers, didn’t want it to be nostalgic or sentimental. But while the collection was lovely and she got a standing ovation, it could have been so much more.
It could have been an exclamation point at the end of what will surely be seen as a meaningful era in the life span of a major brand. A celebration of the contribution of the first woman to run the house.
Such a farewell is not unheard-of in fashion, even if designers now turn over so often and so brusquely that it seems rarer than not. Tom Ford ended his Gucci period with a shower of pink rose petals, a standing ovation and “Nothing Compares 2 U.” Dries Van Noten went out on a silver foil runway with a giant disco ball to commemorate the moment. There’s nothing wrong with designers being recognized for what they brought to a brand, even if, as in this case, the decision to part ways doesn’t seem to have been entirely mutual. (In the announcement of her departure, the decision was cast as Ms, Chiuri’s.)
Especially a designer like Ms. Chiuri, who both helped grow Dior to what is estimated to be close to $9 billion in revenue and expanded its identity more than anyone may have realized. She is quoted in the documentary “Her Dior” — a study of Ms. Chiuri’s work with female artists directed by Loïc Prigent and released in March (an early sign, perhaps, of legacy building) — saying she knew what she was doing. She did.
As Delphine Arnault, the chief executive of Dior, said in the news release about Ms. Chiuri’s departure, “She has written a key chapter in the history of Christian Dior.”
She used her power and position, the financial might of her company, not just to assert a somewhat hackneyed feminism (who could forget the slogan tees or the weird playsuits under princess dresses?), but also to support a variety of female artists as well as a panoply of artisans. To insist on the radical idea that craft belonged on the same level as couture. And, perhaps most significantly of all, to break the stranglehold of the New Look.
In “Her Dior,” Ms. Chiuri said she told the Dior executives when she was hired that the brand’s most signature silhouette, with its cinching and constriction of the female figure, was not for her. To look back at her collections is to see her methodically dismantling it.
She did so first by going through the motions of loosening the stays — figuring out how to preserve the shape without the restrictive underpinnings — and then by eschewing it entirely. Her strength as a designer wasn’t in the giant productions that surrounded her collections but in the internal magic she worked with construction and material. It’s why her work often seemed more enticing in previews, experienced up close, than on the runway, where it could look banal.
It is worth noting that there was not a single bar jacket in the whole cruise show. Or a high heel.
As an alternative, it was strewed with Easter eggs that suggested a finale: references to Chiuri-isms past (to the short film she and Mr. Garrone made during Covid and to the dancers she had included in other shows); to a possible future (her work with the Roman theater); to the last show of her colleague, the former Dior men’s wear designer Kim Jones, who resigned in January. (As in that show, some of Ms. Chiuri’s models were wearing blindfolds.)
Even the inclusion of 31 couture looks among the ready-to-wear seemed a goodbye of sorts. Couture is the next season on the women’s wear schedule, and it would have been Ms. Chiuri’s next collection, if there actually were one. Instead there was just the cruise show’s closing look: an extraordinary gown micro-beaded to resemble a trompe l’oeil heroic torso. Or a relic, perhaps, of what is now officially a time gone by.
Vanessa Friedman has been the fashion director and chief fashion critic for The Times since 2014.
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