Dior Fall Winter 2023

A direct, austere and yet powerfully sexy Parisian walked the Dior runway in Maria Grazia Chiuri’s fall ready-to-wear show. Mostly dressed in black, artfully wrinkled suits and dresses, her wardrobe adroitly addressed both the somber present and the 1950s. This was recognizably Christian Dior’s storied heritage, right enough—but “reconstructed” as Chiuri put it, by a creative director who is focused on seeing how the past can be made relevant for today’s women.

What’s distinctive about the routes Chiuri takes into Dior’s history is that she identifies with the rediscovered, little-known stories of the women who wore his clothes. At a time when we might be craving more simplicity and less performative theatricality from fashion—that’s a yes to pencil midis and plain-but-interesting day dresses—her design solutions came from her personal response to thinking about the feisty resilience of three post-war clients. Present in one way or another on the runway were Catherine Dior, the couturier’s sister; Juliette Gréco, the Left Bank singer and actress who was famed for wearing existentialist black; and Edith Piaf who was, well Edith Piaf. The Dior printed T-shirt of the season read “Je ne regrette rien.”

Chiuri sees all three as forerunners of feminism. “Catherine Dior had come back from a concentration camp, and became an entrepreneur who never married, though she had a long-term relationship. We forget that in the ’50s these women were more liberated than we can imagine,” Churi said during a preview. Then she added, “It was also a way to think about myself. Because in my house, my mother and grandmother were independent women who had come through the Second World War.”

Images courtesy of Armando Grillo.