Couture, cruise, and “beautiful confusion” at Dior

In America, art is under attack. The current administration has significantly reduced funding for arts programs and cancelled grants under the National Endowment for the Arts (and this is on top of proposed censorship and cuts to education). There is no better time for the fashion industry to shed light on the importance of supporting creativity, and there has been no better leader in this space over the last decade than Dior’s Creative Director Maria Grazia Chiuri.

Chiuri is a passionate patron of the arts. Her collections, commercially successful as they’ve been, have always incorporated elements of work from novelists, painters, sculptors, mixed media artists, directors, musicians, and more, the vast majority of them women. (Chiuri is the only woman to have ever lead design for Dior, and one of very few to lead a luxury fashion house today.) Last night in Rome, her cruise 2026 collection, which also included couture, was a celebration of all she holds dear—her hometown, fashion, film, theater, art, and craft.

Staged in the romantic gardens of Villa Albani Tolonia, the show came with a dress code: women in white and men in black. It was not just a show, but an event honoring Chiuri and her family’s recent investment in Rome’s Teatro della Cometa. After five years, the theater is finally open again, and yesterday’s collection paid homage to its founder Countess Anna Leatitia (Mimì) Pecci-Blunt. Like Chiuri, she too was a prolific, fashionable patron of the arts who once spearheaded grand annual balls, the most famous of which came with an elegant, all-white dress code. Chiuri’s collection was mostly rendered in white, save for three looks, two black and one a deep, stage-curtain crimson.

Despite the nods to Mimì and masked balls, every look—the tailcoat- and tuxedo-inspired opening dresses, the delicate sheer embroideries that moved seamlessly with the body, the gown with half of the front corset and skirt overlay missing—was purely Chiuri. The designer told Bazaar that the collection was about exploring “the dynamics between dress and costume, to question how clothes create this distinction between reality and fiction.” She even collaborated with Tirelli, a Roman costume atelier founded in 1964, which, she says, has “this incredible knowledge of historical tailoring. Diving into their archives was an incredible experience.”

Indeed, the silhouettes were at once fluid and precise, dreamy but grounded. These were the kind of cuts and embellishments that Chiuri has perfected over her career, like goddess-inspired, clingy-but-not-too-clingy dresses, or ruffles that were flouncy but not too precious. Chiuri’s clothes could exist in fairy tales, but they’re also made for real women living in the real world.

One of the most provocative pieces in the collection, a visible play between fantasy and reality, was a beaded, kick-pleat gown with a bodice embroidered to look like a marble sculpture of a man’s chest. In this one dress, Chiuri made her obsessions crystal clear: Roman art, feminist art, fashion history, the tension and beauty between male and female forms, theatricality, exquisite craft.

“[I have] recently been very interested in fashion history and how clothes reflect through their cut and construction the idea of time, the expression of an era,” Chiuri said. This collection was a love letter to her era at Dior, a moment for her (and everyone in those rainy gardens who gave her a standing ovation) to applaud self-expression in all its winding, wonderful ways. At the top of Chiuri’s show notes, she referenced Federico Fellini’s semi-autobiographical film 8 ½, which was almost titled The Beautiful Confusion after the state that artists and creatives often find themselves in once one idea has been completed and they’re mining their imagination for the next. Chiuri’s cruise-meets-couture collection was a meditation on this idea, and a call to keep creating no matter what’s on the horizon.

All images: Getty

This article was originally published on Harper's Bazaar.com on May 28 

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