Backstage, before her latest Spring/Summer 2025 Dior haute couture show, Maria Grazia Chiuri was explaining how everything was not what it seemed to be. How a crinoline may be made of bamboo and hung not with a dress but with a leaded vines; how a lace was woven from humble raffia, hundreds of hours in the making; how a sharply tailored men’s frock coat, transposed to the body of a woman, was cut in the stiff, starchy canvas usually hidden inside to shape its lapels. For Chiuri, even after eight years in the job and, counting her previous role at Valentino, almost two decades leading two of the most technically adept fashion houses in the world, couture is still a wonderland.
“The atelier of couture is a place where you can realise your dreams,” Chiuri said. “Where you can transform.” She literally took inspiration from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the nonsensical 1865 novel filled with anthropomorphic animals and its heroine’s fantastical growing and shrinking (Ozempic, much?), and applied its themes to her haute couture collection. Oddly, there’s even a route in Dior to that – Chiuri alighted on Yves Saint Laurent’s first Spring/Summer 1958 collection for the house, named the Trapèze and inspired, in part, by the sweet waistless smocks worn by children, even accompanied by blown-up Claudine collars and oversized bows. Saint Laurent himself was barely out of his teens when he became Dior’s dauphin – so that sense of youth was translated to Chiuri’s show with sweet, naive details in Broderie Anglaise, knotted velvet ribbons and babydoll hemlines.
Sure, Saint Laurent’s stuff looked different here. But when it comes to transformation, Chiuri shifted nothing quite like she changed the crinoline – an inspiration for the wide-spreading skirts of Christian Dior’s New Look – which this season became free cages around the body rather than an armoured prison for its wearer. Chiuri emphasised that the crinolines could be removed, “like an accessory – what form do you want to have?” It’s a question straight out of Lewis Carroll. Recently, Chiuri has become fascinated with fashion history – her offices in Rome and Paris are filled with books in the subject, and in this collection she both celebrated historic forms and deconstructed them. Maybe the publication date of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland inspired: there was a Victoriana feel not only to those caged skirts, but to the surfeit of black, to puffed sleeves and scrolling embroideries and masculine frock-coats sculpted away from the body, like a new take on Dior’s Bar. They’re probably the best jacket Chiuri’s done to date at the house – tracing a Dior line, but bringing something bold and new. Ironic, given they come from the past. Oh, there were also sweet lace bloomers that resembled something Queen Victoria may have worn to seduce Albert in her youth.
All those underpinnings seemed to get Chiuri thinking about the invisible – about what lies beneath. “Material can be structure, but also embellishment,” she reasoned, whirling the kind of horsehair ribbons usually used to stiffen the skirts of grand evening gowns into elaborate surface embroideries, and that cambric toile (which Dior, incidentally, used to line his skirts to give them extra body) was worked into that sculpted little jacket. Transformation again – “craft and creativity can transform materials,” said Chiuri. “It’s something you can only realise with the hand.” That’s kind of a mantra for haute couture, right there. Right?
