'Beautiful confusion' Dior follows Fellini with a love letter to Rome

Dior's first catwalk show in Rome was a night of high drama on and off the catwalk that left the fashion industry with a cliffhanger ending.

- Jess Cartner-Morley

Dior's first catwalk show in Rome was a night of high drama on and off the catwalk that left the fashion industry with a cliffhanger ending. Borrowing the original working title of Federico Fellini's film 8½, Maria Grazia Chiuri, designer of Dior since 2016, called it "the Beautiful Confusion".

She was talking about Rome, with its heady jumble of art, culture, faith and mopeds, and about a collection in which haute couture pieces were mixed with theatrical costumes. But there was also an inescapable allusion to the question of her own future at Dior.

Even before the show opened, operatically coded with models in Venetian masks and knots of Eyes Wide Shut lace pageanting at nightfall through the central parterre of a villa packed with Roman antiquities, the evening was ablaze with intrigue.