“I feel good in my own skin. I’m at peace with my body and my style is defined by the idea of a work uniform: jeans and a T-shirt. Maybe those are the things that make me somehow cool – although I can’t say that without laughing.” Maria Grazia Chiuri herself is, she says, “obsessed with uniforms. Because a uniform is something that helps you live your life.”

From the tips of her platinum blonde bob to the toes of her platform sneakers, her fingers crammed with chunky rings, a Dior Camp satchel bag slung across her body, Chiuri, 57, is cool. She always looks ready for work. It’s that huge sense of purpose she exudes that makes her appear at once engaged and energetic, not rarefied but real, relatable.

Creative director of women’s Haute Couture, Ready To Wear and accessories collections for the House of Dior since July 2016, she is in her office in Paris. From her window, she says, she can see “Paris and the sky” and by her side is her daughter and muse Rachele Regini, and her design team. “Rachele has a very personal view on young women and the challenges of modern life. It’s interesting to take this journey with her at my side. I listen to her because she is the new generation, and because she doesn’t say anything to please me. I need her real, honest opinion. It is impossible to work in fashion now if you don’t try to understand the new world.”

Maria Grazia Chiuri with her daughter Rachele Regini. Photograph via @MARIAGRAZIACHIURI.

The first woman to hold the creative reins at Dior since its foundation 70 years before, when she took up the position in 2016, Chiuri encouraged strong sorority at the house. “Sisterhood is something that’s part of my own background, and something I immediately brought into my work for Dior. It could not have been any other way. I needed to emphasise and reassert sisterhood and the community of women that supports and defines me. My mother’s generation fought for equal opportunities, and I was a beneficiary, but I took it for granted. As if once you get them, you no longer need to talk about them. I was lucky, first with my family, and then working with five women at Fendi.”

Born in Rome in 1964, Chiuri was inspired by her mother, a dressmaker, and knew from an early age that she wanted to pursue a career in fashion. She studied at Istituto Europeo di Design in Rome where she trained in the technical side of fashion design while exploring the cultural and artistic heritage of the Italian capital. Art history and cinema have always informed her work, notably during a decade at Fendi, where she designed handbags, including the iconic Fendi baguette. She left Fendi in 1999 to join Valentino as head of accessories, before becoming joint creative director with Pierpaolo Piccioli in 2008. In 2016, Dior was looking for someone with huge creative vision and they found it in the open, intelligent Chiuri who has an ability to cross-pollinate fashion with the worlds of art, music, theatre, even sport (her SS17 collection inspired by the uniforms of fencing was widely acclaimed) and imbue it with a knowledge and spirit of history, without ever becoming bogged down in nostalgia, or being too “classic”.

“We Should All Be Feminists” T-shirt from Maria Grazia Chiuri’s debut collection for Dior SS17.

Chiuri’s first show for the house was SS17, and it caused a “Dio(r)evolution”. It was both an evolution fashionwise – from Christian Dior himself via Yves Saint Laurent, Marc Bohan, Gianfranco Ferré, John Galliano, Raf Simons to Chiuri herself – and a revolution in terms of communicating a clear message about equal opportunities for women. Via messages on T-shirts, from “We should all be feminists” to “Sisterhood is powerful”, she underlined the simple, straightforward values central to feminism and ignited a new wave of activism among a young and fashionable audience. She lost no time before taking the lead internally at Dior to encourage the values she expressed on the runway. “I am not interested in the old stereotypes, of what a feminist looks like or doesn’t look like,” she says. “I don’t think there is one way to be a feminist. Feminism for me is about equal opportunities. If I am going to stand for something, I would like to stand for this idea: that if you are a woman you can have these opportunities in life.”

Women@Dior was launched in 2017 to coach thousands of young businesswomen, engineers and creatives, selected from schools and universities in 25 countries, to acquire the self-confidence to shape professional careers. In 2019, Chiuri was awarded the Chevalier de l’Ordre National de la Legion d’Honneur by France’s Secretary of State for Gender Equality, Marlene Schiappa. I ask if she feels hopeful, and if progress has been made, in relation to gender equality. “It’s never enough and there is always a little more to be done. That is the spirit I want to bring to the challenge, from inside the extraordinary House of Dior.”

As well as launching Women@Dior, highlighting female creatives has become a Chiuri signature. A 2020 collaboration with American feminist artist Judy Chicago, asked the question “What if Women Ruled the World?” with Chicago creating a monumental installation, “The Female Divine” in the garden of the Musée Rodin in Paris which in turn became the inspiration for the SS20 Haute Couture collection. For AW19, Chiuri used pictures of naked women posed as letters of the alphabet by Bianca Pucciarelli Menna, the Italian artist better known by her male alter ego Tomaso Bingo, to line the walls of the catwalk. As well as championing women and the work of female creatives, Chiuri is hot on the notion of famiglia, even staging the 2020 Cruise collection in Lecce in her homeland of Puglia, in order to promote the region devastated by the pandemic, and its local artists and craft workers.

Maria Grazia Chuiri with artist Tomaso Binga at the Dior AW19 show. Photograph via SARAH PIANTADOSI.

I ask her about being made creative director at Dior, and if she remembers the moment she was offered the role. “Not really. I have a kind of lack of awareness when it comes to accepting challenges, which might be what allowed me to embark on this journey with energy!” The Dior job was not a decision she took lightly, she told the Guardian in a 2016 interview. “We are a traditional Italian family (her husband Paolo Regini is a shirtmaker and the couple have two children, Rachele, and Nicolo, who were both born while she was at Fendi). We ate together every night. So this was a very unusual idea, for us. But when I got the call I thought – at this moment in my life, I could do this. In the past, maybe it wouldn’t have been possible and in the future, well, who knows. Right now, I have the energy to do this. For any woman who works and has a family, it’s not easy. You get home from work and then you need more energy for your family. You need a lot of energy. But I was lucky to have had a husband who always supported me, and that I could afford to pay a babysitter.”

She calls herself the “curator of the idea of Dior”. “Dior is feminine,” she says. “That’s what I kept hearing when I told people I was coming here. But as a woman, ‘feminine’ means something different to me than it means to a man. Feminine is about being a woman, no? I thought to myself: if Dior is about femininity, then it is about women. And not about what it was to be a woman 50 years ago, but to be a woman today, with fashion that corresponds to changing needs, freed from the stereotypes of masculine/feminine, young and not so young.”

Chiuri thinks about all sorts of womens’ body shapes and silhouettes, and the various women who will wear her clothes. “When you are a woman making clothes for women, then fashion is not just about how you look. It is about how you feel and how you think,” she says. For her, fashion is a tool for women to express their authentic, multifaceted identity.

Dior AW21. Photograph via LUDWIG BONNET-JAVA.

Over several collections a year, from Haute Couture, to Ready To Wear, to Cruise, she creates intricate, extraordinary, romantic eveningwear, and sublime but comfortable pieces for “everyday” wear. The idea of a uniform is strong. Blue, white and black figure in every collection and Christian Dior’s beloved red, in addition to grey and pink. Denim is a connective element. Streetwear is an influence, pop culture, looking back (the SS22 collection celebrated the 1960s at Dior) looking forward, never standing still. “I’m always looking ahead. Because it’s important to live today in a way that looks to the future with the right attitude.”

Chiuri is also focused on sustainability. “I want to question fashion’s approach to design and production, rethink its rhythms and methods and move between local and global. It’s about the culture of sustainability and the idea of social sustainability. I’ve always explored a dimension that is more timeless, private and slow. How fashion is interwoven with local traditions, which can become relevant for everyone, thanks to the global communicative power of fashion and of a brand like Dior.”

The Dior SS22 show was a riot of colour and paid homage to Marc Bohan, designer at Dior during the 1960s. Photograph via FREDERIQUE DUMOULIN.

The Cruise 2022 collection was revealed in the Panathenaic Stadium in Athens, a key participant, Ariteidis Tzonevrakis, a tailor and embroiderer whose tiny company in the port of Piraeus in Athens produces the icon Greek fisherman’s cap worn on the island of Hydra since the 1800s. Chiuri’s ability to identify clothing steeped in tradition and memory and meaning and bring it into the canon of Dior, is remarkable. Artisans and small studios and workshops are often invited to collaborate. I ask her about the new power of Small, the theme of our November issue of THE GLOSS: “It’s this idea of social sustainability again. Which certainly includes Small but is not limited to it.” Sometimes Chiuri’s twin obsessions – feminism and sustainability – are combined. The Chanakya School of Craft, a non-profit in Mumbai, empowers women in local communities while preserving global crafts such as hand embroidery. More than 150 female students of the school embroidered each of 21 panels, answering the question first posed by Chiuri and Judy Chicago in Paris: “What if Women Ruled the World?”

The Dior Cruise 2022 finale, Athens.

I ask her whether the relentless nature of a career in fashion ever made her wish she had taken another path? “No, I’ve always done what interested me most and the timing of fashion and design projects reflects my own pace. That pace feeds my curiosity and my thirst for knowledge. I can be tired because there is so much to do. It isn’t stress, but enthusiasm to accomplish everything. Fashion has to be fun, it’s a nice, creative job.” And if her creative spirit needs reviving? “I go to Puglia, where my roots are. I read. I relax through my eyes and my mind.”

The Dior boutique opened late last month at Brown Thomas. The contemporary, elegant space presents Dior’s emblematic accessories, just now the scarves, belts and glasses from the Dior 2022 Cruise collection, and iconic bags – such as the Lady Dior, the Dior Book Tote and the Dior Caro and this season’s must-have micro-bags – alongside jewellery by Victoire de Castellane, including the Rose des Vents collection.

Maria Grazia Chiuri at the Panathenaic Stadium in Athens for Dior Cruise 2022.

If Chiuri does visit Dublin soon, it won’t be for the first time. “I visited Dublin when I was 15 years old. It was a crucial experience for my cultural growth and education. In the mind of a curious teenager like myself, Ireland represented a place of endless landscapes, wild and romantic at the same time, and a place of literary imagination.” And over 40 years later, what does she think of when she hears the word “Ireland”? “Dublin. Green. Guinness.”

The Dior boutique is open at Brown Thomas Dublin.

Chiuri with Chimimanda Ngozi Adichie. The T-shirt which read “We Should All Be Feminists” was a direct reference to celebrated author and activist Adichie’s TEDx talk on the future of feminism. Photograph via ELISE TOIDÉ.

Maria Grazia Chiuri was awarded the Chevalier de l’Ordre National de la Légion d’Honneur in 2019. Photograph via INES MANAI.

The Dior Cruise 2021 show was held in Lecce in Puglia, which is Chiuri’s father’s homeland and where she spent her childhood. Photograph via ALESSANDRO GAROFALO.