Maria Grazia Chiuri in Rome at Villa Albani: after nine years of activism at Dior

Maria Grazia Chiuri ends her tenure at Dior with a show at Villa Albani and a string of Roman references: Mimi Pecci Blunt, Teatro Cometa, Pietro Ruffo’s zodiac, and the Torlonia Foundation

Maria Grazia Chiuri and Dior: feminism, activism, her voice

Nine years ago, Maria Grazia Chiuri arrived at Dior—she started an act of activism. Printing it on T-shirts, she shouted that we should all be feminists. Over these years: connections and footnotes, commissions, revisions; exhibitions, talks, books. All orbiting one text only: women.

2016. Maria Grazia Chiuri’s activism was ahead of its time. The industry was dazzled by digital metrics, conversion rates, and the commodification of male and female bodies. It was a kind of new intellectual pornography: the selfie, pure vanity, not even for sex. Maria Grazia spoke of feminism instead. She lifted Dior’s revenue, helped by launching a Tote Bag: simple, rigid, geometric. When I first saw it, I never imagined the cult of money it would spark. With numbers on her side, Chiuri earned the right to raise her voice.

A raspy voice with a Roman cadence. Many call her simply Maria Grazia—no need for a last name, a sign within a sign. Quick quips, ready laughter—an accent that lingers even in English when she speaks to the French. The French, for their part, keep their sing-song English, they promise us it sounds sublime. Maria Grazia lets them do it. Kohl-rimmed eyes, a square-cut face, personality in her stride, in jeans, in platinum-blond or jet-black hair. We should all be feminists.

Women and the fashion system: Villa Albani

Then came COVID, then war, another war, and American embarrassment—both cancel culture and a president ranting Drill, Baby, Drill. Today Maria Grazia’s activism is a steady heading in fashion. Beyond execution, her search for women is existential: her daughter Rachele, every girl who will cross the street alone tomorrow. Women’s strength. No, we won’t be the same—different powers, moves and countermoves: always a woman will solve this earthly puzzle, giving life to those who arrive. When a man realizes he is merely a tool, he comforts himself in homosexuality.

Fashion today needs a message. Communication is empty without a concrete project dedicated to community and civic life. One chapter closed—her work for Dior—Maria Grazia opens another one. Rain hammered onto Villa Albani. The orchestra struggled, sheet music soaked, at the center of boxed parterres. At the finale, the Italian press stood to applaud—while Americans assumed homage was a given. Like a wave, everyone rose: craftsmen, the entire Fendi family, the Roman society—honoring a poetic extraterrestrial who comes home from Paris to make noise.

Teatro Cometa and Mimi Pecci Blunt

Teatro Cometa was restored by Maria Grazia Chiuri—not by Dior, though with its blessing. That morning, on a visit, she was accompanied by Delphine Arnault and Olivier Bialobos—another round of applause for past work and futures to come.

Mimi Pecci Blunt was an archive fanatic. She wore Dior, posed for Cecil Beaton. Born in Carpineto Romano, she studied with nuns, banking on their school’s reputation to score Paris ball invitations where she hoped to find a good husband. Maria Grazia rediscovered her story—the Jewish husband, the flight to America, Villa Marlia. Mimi commissioned Teatro Cometa and Tommaso Buzzi’s designs. Chiuri revives these Roman references. Monsieur Dior’s zodiac signs are redrawn by Pietro Ruffo at Pastificio Cerere. The stars shine brighter as they near St. Peter’s.

Fashion faces a reputation crisis fueled by daily papers’ mock-serious tone and finance blogs’ soap-opera hype. The industry is ambivalent toward Maria Grazia. Her commercial success inflames snobbery. Slithering flatterers promise to grasp her philology—a word repeated too often—though for them public relations outweigh intellectual risk.

Villa Albani, the Torlonia Foundation

The other night in Rome, Maria Grazia Chiuri staged her final Dior show. Villa Albani, opened for the first time by the Torlonia Foundation—a hidden treasure of a centuries-old, black-clad Rome that can still yawn at Parisian billions—was the venue. For two weeks more than a thousand people built the spectacle: a re-creation of an eighteenth-century painting, when Rome’s Baroque barely grazed French Enlightenment Rococo, wrapped in cardinal purple. Theatrum Mundi. Maximum defense and enlightened attack—the moves of a woman who towers above the system, empowered by her people. Rich and not, sly and honest, Romans, rough Romans, sexy and sexier, agitated or drowsy, blessed or bland—Maria Grazia has her crowd, her language.

Carlo Mazzoni