Maria Grazia Chiuri, the first female designer of Christian Dior, has a specific idea as to her role in the new wave of feminism. Fashion, she believes, represents the public face of femininity. “My job as a designer is to create the wardrobe for the image that women want to portray of themselves,” she said backstage at Musée Rodin, after a show which opened Paris fashion week. “We have to listen to women, to hear what is the point of view of women now, of the new generation.”
It is four seasons since Grazia Chiuri’s opening gambit as Dior designer was a T-shirt reading “We should all be feminists”, and the cry is as loud as ever. The venue for the latest show, an ultra-modern boxed marquee in the museum garden, was papered inside and out with slogans of female empowerment, such as “Women’s rights are human rights”, slapped on top of vintage magazine covers.
Slogans of female empowerment were emblazoned on the catwalk. Photograph: Victor Boyko/Getty Images
The theme for this season emerged when Grazia Chiuri visited It’s Just a Beginning, an exhibition about 1968 at the National Gallery of Modern Art in her native Rome. Back in Paris, she examined the Dior archives for that year and found a photo of young women outside a boutique in the city holding placards reading “Support the miniskirt”, a protest against the conservatively long hemlines by the label’s designer at the time, Marc Bohan.
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