Dior’s new creative director – the first female in its 70-year history to hold the post – is fascinated by modern women and how she can reflect their lives in the clothes she makes
It is Christian Dior who gazes down gravely from the portrait in oils, whose dresses are in the silver-framed photographs that sit at an elegant slant beneath the white orchids, and whose name is stamped in distinctive sharp-serifed font on the reception desk at Dior HQ on Rue de Marignan. But the living, breathing creative force of today’s Christian Dior, who darts in shaking the rain out of her tousled bob, is a woman. What’s more, Maria Grazia Chiuri is nothing like the full-skirted, doe-eyed figure whose image is conjured up by the name Dior. She wears a black sheepskin coat, flat buckled black shoes and black trousers with a Mod-sharp crease.
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