House Dior's First Female Art Director

Interview With Maria Grazia Chiuri 

Like all the fashion rock stars, she has her signature look: slicked-back, side-parted platinum-blonde hair; all-black outfit; dark smoky eyes. In the white and light-filled lounge of the Dior house on Rue de Marignan, Maria Grazia Chiuri, 53, laughs a lot. She’d rather not think of the many women she inspired to tuck their T-shirt into their floorlength skirt. Nor of the many obstacles that stood in her way. ‘Whatever they were, I seem to have overcome them,’ she says. She seems to accept her rise with flippancy. In September 2016, for her first show as art director of Dior’s women’s collections, she threw a feminist stone at the luxury industry, by inscribing Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s ‘We should all be feminists’ on a T-shirt. Today, she evokes the feminist book Women Who Run With the Wolves to encourage women to trust their instincts. She came up with J’ADIOR, a play on Galliano’s ‘J’adore Dior’ and Millennials have embraced it; it has become the symbol of her appointment. She is a tarot reader and loves symbols. Around her neck she wears a golden S, like Superman.

Why did you choose to express yourself through fashion?

I decided to take this path when I was 12 years old. My mother wanted to keep dressing me up like a little doll, with pigtails and bows. I didn’t like it, so I went to the flea market and bought myself a pair of jeans and an army jacket. My mother didn’t like it. But it’s my body, and you need to be able to recognise yourself in the mirror. It’s the same thing with my hair – everyone thinks I have brown hair, but I’m naturally a blonde. I dyed my hair brown for years, because that’s how I saw myself.

Your mother was a seamstress. What vision of femininity did you learn from her?