Her Dior: Maria Grazia Chiuri’s New Voice

Since being appointed the first female creative director of Dior in 2016, Maria Grazia Chiuri has infused the illustrious fashion brand with a strong current of feminism. Her approach is at once refreshing and needed, while still paying homage to the avant-garde ethos that has been at the heart of the house since its founding by Christian Dior in 1947.

Her Dior presents 160 images by leading female photographers such as Nan Goldin, Sarah Moon, Brigitte Niedermair, Coco Capitán, Vanina Sorrenti, Julia Hetta, Katerina Jebb, Zoë Ghertner, and Bettina Rheims. The women creators featured among these pages represent the breadth of style and diversity upheld by the Maison Dior. Thought-provoking quotes and poems from inspirational women–Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Linda Nochlin, Claire Fontaine, Judy Chicago, and Tomaso Binga, to name a few–accompany the striking photographs.

Showcasing Chiuri’s haute couture and ready-to-wear collections from 2017 to 2021, Her Dior captures the creative director’s innovations at the house–where, for the past five years, she’s reclaimed the narrative creating Dior fashions for women, by women.

” Our role is to offer hope. If the fashion community engages in a dialog and finds solutions to concrete and immediate problems, we can look to a future. But if we spend our time arguing, going after each other, there will be no solution. (…) After a period in which globalization tended towards standardization, we finally return to the valorization of differences and identities. ”
Maria Grazia Chiuri, extract from her interview in Numéro magazine, september 7th 2020.

About The Author
Born in Rome in February 1964, Maria Grazia Chiuri wanted to enter “fashion” very young. Born of a lineage of strong women, as she herself says, she grew up in the 1970s and 1980s during the great social debates for the liberation of women. In a Catholic Italy, these issues extend to families where intergenerational conflict pits young people in need of freedom against the dogmatic principles of their elders.

Today, she focuses on the masculine and feminine as a creative director, but also as an art critic, fashion curator and author. She is also the director of the fashion design course at the Istituto Universitario di Architettura di Venezia (IUAV).