In this year of designer reshuffling, there is still no official confirmation of Maria Grazia Chiuri’s departure from Dior. But her Orlando-inspired fall 2025 show at the Tuileries Garden in Paris today, which was stage directed by the acclaimed theater director Robert Wilson and featured rocks falling from the sky, tips of icebergs, a soaring bird, and a tableau vivant confetti shower had all the trappings of a grand farewell. Or make that a stop on the farewell tour: Chiuri still has at least two mega shows on the books, pre-fall 2025 in Kyoto in April, followed by resort 2026 in her hometown of Rome in May.
Chiuri has been Dior’s creative director since 2016, just two years shy of the length of founder Christian Dior’s own tenure at the maison—and practically an eon in today’s designer merry-go-round. In the eight years since she first sent a slogan tee down the runway emblazoned with the title of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s essay We Should All Be Feminists, Chiuri has made one of the world’s largest luxury brands a platform to amplify the voices of female artists.
Chiuri’s choice of a Virginia Woolf novel about a time traveling poet who swaps centuries and genders and uses clothing as a means of self actualization as the collection’s guiding inspiration was a powerful note to end on. Woolf wrote about “frock consciousness,” the idea that how you are seen and how you feel are intimately related. In addition to historical garments such as crinolines, ruffs, and breeches Orlando tried on between the 16th and 20th centuries, Chiuri’s collection highlighted her own most recognizable signatures: full-coverage underpinnings that help sheer tulle dresses shift from sexy to sporty.
Also on view: the cantilevered hiplines Chiuri recently explored in her spring 2025 and spring 2024 couture collections. The latter are a deep cut to Monsieur Dior’s sharply structured Cigale dress from 1952, and the collection was peppered with such Easter eggs. There were early ’90s Gianfranco Ferré frilly white blouses, and from the John Galliano era, J’Adore Dior t-shirts, frock coats, and even ermine-style trims like those found on a fall 2004 couture gown currently on display at the Louvre. Taken together, they made the case that no matter who is at the helm, Dior offers a limitless canvas for gender play.
