Dior's New Guard

Maria Grazia Chiuri makes her mark as the first woman to take charge of the venerable Parisian house.

- Justine Picardie

Gone are the days when an editor could return from a month of fashion shows and pronounce with absolute authority that there would be a certain look for women in the coming season; for now we live in an era where style is as fragmented and eclectic as every other part of contemporary culture. Nevertheless, there was one message in the Spring 2017 collections that seemed clearer than any other: we should all be feminists emblazoned across T-shirts at Dior, where Maria Grazia Chiuri made her debut as the first female artistic director since the launch of the house, 70 years ago.

The slogan was a quote from the Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, whose influential 2013 TEDx talk of the same title was given further prominence when Beyoncé sampled it in her anthem “Flawless” later that year. This song was also part of the soundtrack to Chiuri’s catwalk show, where Adichie herself sat front row as a guest of honor. The effect was as dramatic (albeit in a very different way) as Christian Dior’s launch show in February 1947, when the couturier introduced a sweeping departure from postwar austerity, with extravagant full skirts and a vision of romantic femininity. Dior’s “New Look” (as it was christened by Carmel Snow, Bazaar’s editor at the time) became famous the world over, though it is only in retrospect that one can see the prewar nostalgia that had created this apparently radical silhouette—with its reintroduction of corseting that evoked the lost days of a ladylike Belle Époque.