Filled with punk mohawk headpieces made of feathers and bamboo cage skirts with trailing flowers and butterflies fashioned from organza, lace, and raffia, Maria Grazia Chiuri’s Dior couture spring 2025 show offered a pure dose of fashion fantasy. With Fred again.. and Angie McMahon’s soulful “light dark light” (a song about learning to dance again) on the soundtrack, the collection captured a sense of unease and resilience that mirrored the mood of the moment. The collection notes spoke of creating a space of “total freedom, as if the mirrors that fill the couture studio could, similar to Alice’s looking glass, allow access to another reality.”
If the total effect was very Wonderland, all of the grounded signatures Chiuri has developed in her tenure at Dior over the eight-plus years since she first sent “We Should All Be Feminists” t-shirts down the runway were present and accounted for, from the feminist messaging to the sheer dresses worn over practical briefs. And while it was hard to imagine the use case for, say, a pannier-hip broderie anglaise nightgown, these were clothes to make you dream.
It was an exaltation of the petit mains at Dior’s couture atelier, the artisans whose featherwork, flower-making, and embroidery handwork puts the haute in couture. That point was underscored by the stunning set, featuring nine large-scale textile panels, executed as for all of Chiuri’s couture shows, by Chanakya ateliers and the Chanakya School of Craft. The Mumbai-based artisans translated into embroidery stitches from some of Indian visual artist Rithika Merchant’s paintings fusing comparative mythology, science, and speculative fiction—in which trees with eyes stand tall.
Chiuri fused two looks in the Dior archives: Christian Dior’s La Cigale, a fall 1952 couture moiré dinner dress with a cantilevered hipline that she previously explored in her spring 2024 couture collection; and Yves Saint Laurent’s spring 1958 couture Trapeze dress. She let air into the former by chopping it off to minidresses and miniskirts the length of the latter—or even shorter—allowing bare legs to roam free. Most of the looks had skin showing via visible bustiers or tulle and organza bloomers. But this being a woman-designed collection, bits you don’t want to show remained covered thanks to clever double-layer underpinnings.
