Viva La Fashion Revolution

One more way Maria Grazia Chiuri is bringing woman power to the house of Dior? By teaming up with female artists. In these pages, she packs up her cruise collection and heads to Oaxaca to work with Mexican photographer and art-world legend Graciela Iturbide.

- Veronique Hyland

 A SURREALIST BLACK-AND-WHITE IMAGE OF A woman wearing a crown of iguanas was what first snagged on Maria Grazia Chiuri’s consciousness. When she saw it, “I was fascinated,” she remembers, and she immediately wanted to know more about its photographer, Graciela Iturbide. That curiosity ultimately resulted in the Dior artistic director heading from her Paris home base to Iturbide’s native Mexico—her first cruise collection in tow—for this shoot in Oaxaca.

Mexico City–based Iturbide, 75, is known for her images of strong, somewhat feral women in nature—notably her portraits of the Juchitán people, a matriarchal tribe in Oaxaca (indeed, Nuestra Señora de Las Iguanas—“Our Lady of the Iguanas”—came from that series). Her female-centric oeuvre also includes a photo series set in Frida Kahlo’s bathtub, where the painter has often depicted herself, and Cholas, which followed young Mexican American women living in East L.A.