Collection rooted in reinvention

Fresh from dressing Mikey Madison, Maria Grazia Chiuri draws on Virginia Woolf’s Orlando in new twist on classics, writes Morwenna Ferrier.

"In fashion, you can’t invent something new," said the creative director of Dior, Maria Grazia Chiuri, backstage before her autumn/winter 2025 show.

But you can reinvent it.

And so, in the Tuileries garden, Chiuri took an everyday basic — the white shirt — turned it on its head, and placed it front and centre in a monumental five-act show that featured mechanical pterodactyls, giant boulders, flashing lights and a lot of lace.

Chiuri is no stranger to reinvention. The Dior show marked the first major day of Paris fashion week — the last and now largest of the "big four" by some stretch — and took place shortly after the Oscars, in which Chiuri, who is the first woman to head Dior, achieved the white whale of fashion: dressing the winner of the best actress Oscar. Not only that, she did so with another reinvention — her take on Dior’s 1956 Bal à Paris gown, which she updated in pink silk satin, for Anora’s Mikey Madison.

Chiuri had no idea Madison would wear it until the night: "You send a sketch and some material and then you just have to cross your fingers," she said. "It’s a lottery — they might not like it!"

In the end, Madison wore two Dior dresses, while Sean Baker, Anora’s director, also wore a tux by Dior.

The Paris collection was not only rooted in reinvention and paying homage to previous Dior designers but — as is often Chiuri’s bent — a literary figure. This time it was Virginia Woolf and her novel Orlando, a theme that has been endlessly plundered by fashion, inspiring (among others) Burberry, Fendi, Givenchy, an entire Met gala and, latterly, Harry Styles’ penchant for a gobstopper pearl.

But with good reason. Woolf was fascinated by fashion. She wrote for — and was photographed by — Vogue; regularly used clothes as a plot device (notably Clarissa Dalloway and her "mermaid’s dress"); and coined the term "frock consciousness" to examine how our mood can be changed by clothes and vice-versa.

Fittingly for a satirical novel in which a man becomes a gender-nonconforming woman over several centuries, the collection was one of the most gender-fluid to date. Models with gamine-cropped hair wore trenchcoats and red military jackets while others with flowing hair marched out in boudoir-friendly lace gowns, leather bombers and detachable ruffles.

The collection also featured a handful of now iconic bar jackets, first created in 1947 by Christian Dior as part of his "new look" collection to demonstrate a new woman emerging from World War 2. These jackets, which have round shoulders and cinched waists, have been reinterpreted by all of Dior’s creative directors but, thanks to their stretch, Chiuri’s tend to be the most wearable.

Dotted among the looks were also Chiuri’s spin on John Galliano’s classic "‘J’adore Dior" T-shirt, which he designed in the ’00s before being sacked from the brand for an antisemitic rant.

The white shirt was a homage to the ’90s Dior designer Gianfranco Ferré, who loved them for their structure. Some came fitted with ruffles; others billowed over corsets. This item, weaponised to distraction by Meghan on Netflix this week (she prefers J Crew), suggests a return to simplicity or conservatism, or both.

Fashion’s desire for basics often returns in times of crisis, though whether that crisis is global or internal is up for debate — Dior’s sales quadrupled between 2017 and 2023 but have since declined.

In teeing up clothes that work for both sexes, there is every chance the Italian-born Chiuri, who has been at Dior since 2016, is responding to rumours that she will leave, and that Jonathan Anderson — the Irish designer who made avant garde fashion commercial at Loewe — will take on both men’s and women’s. If she does, then she goes out with a show that proves reinvention will always be on-trend. — The Observer