THE POWER OF TWO

MARIA GRAZIA CHIURI of Dior’s women’s collections and KARISHMA SWALI of Chanakya School of Craft have worked together symbiotically and in their individual capacities to bring the works of other women to the fore. They help Ashwini Arun Kumar explore the power of true collaboration that underlines both their work, in this exclusive interview about their association

- Ashwini Arun Kumar

Maria Grazia Chiuri has been working in fashion since she was 20. She spent 10 years at Fendi after joining the brand as a designer in the accessories department in 1989. (The Baguette? She was quintessential to its making.) She was handpicked by Valentino Garavani himself in 1999, along with Pier Paolo Piccioli (Valentino’s current creative director) – he worked alongside her at Fendi too – to design accessories for his eponymous Italian design house. In 2008, the duo became co-creative directors of Valentino, and were responsible for taking the heritage brand to even greater heights and restoring it to its past glory. Despite years of being at the crux of several such seminal fashion moments, fame – in colossal magnitude – came only in 2016 when, at 52, she was appointed to lead the House of Dior. This time without a co-creative partner. It was the first time in the house’s illustrious history of making clothes for women that a woman was actually in charge of designing them (after foundercouturier Christian Dior, and following Yves Saint Laurent, Marc Bohan, Gianfranco Ferré, John Galliano, Bill Gaytten and Raf Simons). This itself warrants a conversation about women occupying positions of power in fashion.