ART AT THE HEART Maria Grazia Chiuri on why female creativity in all its forms is the nucleus of her work for Dior
Since taking the helm at Dior, Maria Grazia Chiuri has supported and uplifted women artists through a unique series of collaborations that define her bold, feminist outlook
especially if you come from a simple background. It’s much easier to say you want to be a lawyer. When I told my family I wanted to work in fashion, they thought I was crazy.’
It seems hard to believe that a woman who has spent the past three decades steadily conquering the fashion world could ever have struggled to persuade anyone of her vocation. Yet it is precisely her conviction that artistic pursuits are worth fighting for that has put inclusivity at the core of Maria Grazia Chiuri’s vision at Dior. Since becoming the house’s first female creative director in 2016, she has consistently sought to provide a forum for the talents of women artists – a term she defines in its broadest sense, encompassing not only painters and sculptors, but also writers, poets, healers, dancers, makers and designers like herself.
Chiuri’s love of art goes hand in hand with her Italian roots, as she tells me over Zoom from Puglia, where she is sitting in a sunny courtyard garden, dressed in her signature black and smoking a cigarette with typically Mediterranean flair. Though exhausted after an emotionally draining few months of planning shows no less ambitious than her pre-pandemic presentations, she is generous with her time and passionate in her conversation, reinforcing her responses to my questions with frequent and expressive hand gestures. ‘If, like me, you are born in Rome, it is impossible not to connect with art – you’re surrounded by it,’ she declares. ‘At school, I had very good teachers who organised beautiful visits around museums and galleries… but all of the references were male – Caravaggio, Da Vinci, Raphael. Art in Italy is so closely associated with the idea of male genius.’ When Chiuri eventually discovered the work of female artists such as Frida Kahlo, it opened the door to a new way of thinking. ‘I was fascinated by the language used by women in art – it’s completely different, closer with their bodies, their personal life, more intimate somehow.’
On coming to Dior, Chiuri saw an opportunity to bring that language to a new generation of women, enabling them to learn its nuances from an early age. ‘I think when you are young, it’s vital to have these references, to believe there are other people out there who feel what you do,’ she reflects. ‘Dior is a very famous brand with a big platform – I want to share it with other artists, to give a voice to women who have something to say. I often wonder whether, if I’d heard from them myself when I was young, my life would have been different. Perhaps I’d have felt less alone…’
This might explain her determination to support female artists who, having forged their careers in somewhat less enlightened times, have not yet had their chance to shine: among them, the 87-year-old visual poet Lucia Marcucci, to whom Chiuri is currently preparing to pay tribute in her spring/summer show. We are speaking in August, a month before the event is staged, so her ideas are still taking shape, but her passion for Marcucci, both as a poet and as a person, speaks volumes. ‘I first saw one of her posters a few years ago, at the Artissima fair in Turin – I didn’t even know the artist’s name, but I knew right away that I had to have it,’ she recalls. ‘Later, when I met Lucia in Florence, I thought she was just unbelievable – she has such a light in her heart.’ For the new show, Chiuri will work with Marcucci to realise a project the poet had begun in 2011 but never completed – an ‘extraordinary piece that represents considerable effort in its complexity’ and that will testify to the ‘great communicative power’ of her unique creative lexicon. ‘It’s artwork that questions rules and preconceptions,’ explains Chiuri. ‘Visual poetry uses words that make an artistic statement but also play an activist role. She reaffirms their importance as a social and political tool.’
The power of words has been central to Chiuri’s approach since her very first collection for Dior back in September 2016, when she emblazoned the author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s essay title ‘We Should All Be Feminists’ across models’ T-shirts, embarking on a courageous mission to prove that fashion is about more than just aesthetics. ‘Chimamanda is unique because she says important things but in a way that feels light. If you have the grounding of an academic but can use the language of pop culture like that, you can pass on an incredible message,’ says Chiuri. Since then, she has consistently focused on conversing with the public rather than with professors or professionals: for instance, her invocation of the late American art historian Linda Nochlin’s 1971 tract ‘Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?’ in her spring/ summer 2018 collection was designed less as a challenge to the narrow-minded art industry than as a call to arms for creative women worldwide. ‘Linda’s book really illuminated me – reading it gives you hope for the future,’ she says. ‘It shows you have a right and a necessity to express your creativity, even if you don’t come from a family with a high education.’
Chiuri’s inherently egalitarian world view may lie behind her attraction to alternative
‘You have to fight to become an artist.
It isn’t easy,
forms of pedagogy, such as those espoused by the feminist author and spiritual teacher Vicki Noble, whose work encourages women to reconnect to their intuition and embrace elements of magical thinking. Noble, who had not heard of Chiuri when she received a call from the designer’s assistant on the eve of her 70th birthday, was deeply moved by the opportunity to introduce her ideas to an international audience. ‘It was as if I was passing the torch, counting on Maria Grazia to take my vision forward,’ she says of the collaboration, which saw Chiuri use motifs from the Motherpeace tarot cards that Noble had co-created with Karen Vogel back in the 1990s. ‘Her artistic expression helped transmit those images a thousand times further than Karen or I could have ever reached.’
By bringing spirituality into the mainstream, Chiuri set out to challenge orthodox – and predominantly masculine – ways of thinking, offering up a more openminded feminist alternative. Surrealist artists, with their emphasis on unlocking subliminal creative potential, have long been a source of inspiration for her, from the late, great Leonora Carrington (an influence on the otherworldly film in which a mesmerising cast of mermaids and nymphs model the autumn/winter 2020 haute couture collection against the backdrop of an enchanted forest) to Penny Slinger, with whom she joined forces last year. Tasked with designing the scenography to commemorate the Dior creative team’s move out of the historic Avenue Montaigne building in Paris, the California-based artist decided to transform each salon into a different element – fire, water, air and earth – creating, in her words, an ‘alchemy to represent the feminine in the forces of nature’. In Chiuri, Slinger found a kindred spirit – someone willing to tap into surrealist traditions to ‘represent a feminine way of knowing and being that is not confined to the rational world’.
The elevation of woman to a supra-human, almost divine status reached its zenith in Chiuri’s collaboration with the groundbreaking feminist artist Judy Chicago for Dior’s spring/summer 2020 haute couture show. Chicago’s 225-foot-long womb-like installation in the gardens of Paris’ Musée Rodin, within which the show was staged, was a paean to female empowerment that recognised women as fruitful – both literally, in terms of their reproductive potential, and metaphorically, for their unstoppable creativity. The project’s sheer scope was important to Chiuri, who wanted to give Chicago the physical space in which to create something befitting the scale of her ambition (‘Why,’ she asks, ‘should women not aspire to make monumental art?’). At the same time, the sensuality of the work lent it an intimacy that was echoed in the ornate craftsmanship in Chiuri’s collection. Models wearing tunic-style dresses with braided details inspired by Greco-Roman styles and jackets woven with gilded thread strode down a catwalk suspended with banners bearing feminist slogans, all designed by Chicago and beautifully embroidered by seamstresses in India. This was by no means the first time Chiuri had paid homage to artisanal techniques usually associated with the feminine or domestic sphere. ‘Craft is a primary element of humanity, but it’s never given the same value as art, and I think that’s a big misunderstanding,’ she says. ‘When I travelled to India, I met so many women makers in local villages, and the way they speak about their work is incredible – it’s really a language that they express in textiles.’ Artists who work with fabric have frequently made appearances in Chiuri’s back catalogue: Sheila Hicks, known for her experimental approach to weaving, created the striking large-scale artworks for Dior’s autumn/winter 2019 campaign, while the African American artist Mickalene Thomas reinterpreted the house’s classic Bar jacket in her signature patchwork-collage style for the Cruise 2020 collection, unveiled in Marrakesh. That show also saw Chiuri call upon the talents of artisans at the Ivory Coast-based manufacturer Uniwax, which produced a series of beautiful wax prints using a method unique to the factory.
In drawing upon a multiplicity of grassroots skills, the Marrakesh presentation – widely praised for falling on the right side of the line between cultural appreciation and appropriation – can perhaps be read as a forerunner to Chiuri’s more recent, and deeply personal, exploration of the power of community. Held in the Puglian city of Lecce, the region where the designer spent much of her childhood, her Cruise 2021 show had the welcoming feel of a local festival, albeit with scaled-down attendance because of coronavirus restrictions. ‘We wanted to have the event in the piazza, because in a place like Lecce, the party is always in the square,’ explains Chiuri. The multidisciplinary artist Marinella Senatore, herself from southern Italy, was perfectly placed to realise this vision, having consistently put communities at the heart of her practice. ‘An artist’s vision should be attentive, not abusive, and it was important that the city did not feel we were “imposing” something on them,’ Senatore tells me.