The season’s opening look was a sweater with a feisty intarsia logo. 

“And then I discovered that Bohan’s response to this was to introduce the Miss Dior line, to give these younger consumers what they wanted,” Grazia Chiuri said. “I thought it was so interesting to see fashion listening to women. And there is something about now that is similar to 1968. This is another moment when everything is changing.”

The female empowerment slogan has become as central to Dior under Grazia Chiuri as the full skirt was to the house in the days of its founder, and this season’s opening look was a feisty intarsia sweater reading “C’est Non, Non, Non et Non”. There was a more tomboyish, less delicate air to Dior this season, with fewer ballerina-length hems and visible bra straps. Instead, there was an appealing new skirt shape in elegant pleated kilts with Dior-stamped waistbands, and blazers which abandoned the traditional bar curve at the hip for a more laid-back line. 

Bianca Jagger, who was rocking elegant unisex tailoring in 1968 when she wore Yves Saint Laurent’s then new Le Smoking suits, was a special front row guest. But it was those pieces which revived 1968 most literally – patchwork jackets and ponchos – which seemed the least likely to be successful in appealing to a millennial audience for whom the 2000s are vintage and the 1990s are fancy-dress retro. The looks which riffed on the new Dior aesthetic that Grazia Chiuri is defining – block-capital logos under transparent layers, tailored jackets with fluid skirts, handbags in the revived classic blue-and-white house monogram – were those which promised to spread the word.

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