This season there has definitely been an air of death and rebirth at Dior. A metamorphosis or “reawakening,” as the press release puts it, “Maria Grazia Chiuri disrupts the order of time, taking us back to a dimension that belongs neither to past nor future, between childhood and adulthood, dream and reality.”
With Kim Jones’s recent exit from Dior Homme still fresh, rumors swirled that Chiuri herself might be next. But on the couture stage in Paris, she refused to slip quietly into the night.
Filled with punk mohawk headpieces woven from feathers and bamboo-cage skirts dusted with trailing organza flowers and raffia butterflies, Chiuri’s Spring–Summer 2025 couture show served pure fashion fantasy. Angie McMahon’s “light dark light”—a song about learning to dance again—pulsed through the open studio, mirroring a collection alive with both unease and resilience. Here, sheer gowns floated above practical briefs, and structured bodices met frothy embroideries, as if Alice’s looking glass in the mirrored atelier had ushered us into another reality.
It was an exaltation of the petit·es mains at Dior’s couture atelier—the artisans whose feather-working, flower-making, and hand-embroideries put the “haute” in haute couture. Nine monumental textile panels by Chanakya’s Mumbai ateliers transformed Rithika Merchant’s eye-tree mythologies into undulating stitches, so that the backdrop itself became a living, breathing installation.
Chiuri mined her archives next: Christian Dior’s 1952 “La Cigale” moiré dinner dress was reborn as a cropped skirt-and-jacket duo, the iridescent fabric catching the lights like quicksilver. Yves Saint Laurent’s 1958 Trapèze silhouette reappeared in micro-mini form, swirling above knee-length hems that felt mischievous and new. Crinoline cages popped up at waists and shoulders, their delicate floral embroideries nodding to both memory and metamorphosis.
Picking up that thread, the show swept us deeper into Chiuri’s couture wonderland. Sculpted jackets evoked whispered armor, softened at their hemlines. Lace gowns shimmered with quiet power—sheer but never gratuitous. Skirts of liquid silk skimmed stone floors, while capes hovered with ecclesiastical drama. One of the most haunting details: lace blindfolds draped across the models’ eyes, turning each face into an icon of ritual and mystery. Every look felt like a relic of some sacred narrative, unearthed and reinterpreted for the here and now.
Fred again.. and McMahon’s voice threaded through the evening like a pulse, shifting from edgy anticipation to moments of hushed reverence. In this soundscape, dresses felt alive—gabardine coats trimmed in raffia, organza gowns with ragged ribbon edges, and wind-tossed tulle bloomers that whispered with every step. It was couture as living art, breathing and fracturing with each gesture.
If rumors hold true and this is indeed Chiuri’s final couture bow, she leaves with a manifesto of fearless reinvention. Dior’s spring-summer 2025 show may have closed a chapter, but in its echoes of myth and memory, it insisted that every ending is simply another beginning.
