A Passage to India

At Dior’s fall 2023 show in Mumbai, Mana Grazia Chiuri unveiled a paean to craft

- By Veronique Hyland

Where you might see stitches, Maria Grazia Chiuri sees a language. Specifically, “a language of women.” The painstaking work that they have been doing in domestic spaces, without fanfare or recognition, is like an oral history handed down via needle and thread. “In fashion, we were more focused on the volume, the shape, the cut,” she says. Meanwhile, craft “was not so much celebrated in fashion. There was an idea that it was only decoration, that it was not language.”