As is if the ho-hum clothes were not sufficient, they were shown against clichéd sayings. Never enough at Dior

We get it: Maria Grazia Chiuri is an unapologetic feminist. Not enough with proving that she is a woman designing for women desirable clothes at Dior, she wants them to hear her pronounce encouraging, declarative, pro-women words. Nothing wrong with that. But how many times since her debut collection in 2017—with her “We Should All Be Feminists”—must she make her messages so crucial to the communicative ability of her collections? Or, show that she’s really an activist at heart? Perhaps the aphorisms have become more appealing than the clothes. Designers have used their platforms to convey political/social beliefs (the late Vivienne Westwood comes to mind). But not this frequently. Or this annoyingly. For the spring/summer 2024 Dior show, Ms Chiuri did not only share a message, or two. She bombarded the presentation with more than a dozen. They took the attention away from the clothes, even with something as trite as “I AM NOT ONLY A MOTHER/WIFE/DAUGHTER/I AM A WOMAN”. Yes, in shouty full caps, punctuation-free. Donald Trump would have loved it.

There was nothing subtle about the presentation itself. If those messages—some in the form of what looked like vintage but TikTok-worthy ads—didn’t grab you, the colours were chosen to: Stabilo Boss pink and yellow (including the striped runway). Welcome to Barbie World. And in case you were not able to identify the colours, another message helpfully told you: “FUCHSIA WITH YELLOW IS NOT A MARSHMALLOW/IT’S MY WAY TO HIGHLIGHT WHAT IS WRONG AND WHAT IS RIGHT”. We could not help wondering—did the guests look at the clothes or were they reading the sententious words? Or if they were, like us, irritated with the repeatedly clicking sounds of the digital on-screen graphics, designed by the Italian visual artist Elena Bellantoni, coming on and off with the same sharpness as old mechanical flight information display systems in airports, audible even when the soundtrack—that included surprisingly indie fare, such as Spivak’s My Loneliness is Healing Me and Anjimile’s The King—was prompting the models to ignore the rhythm.

The show space might have been brighten by the fuchsia and the yellow, but the clothes were as vivid as Bianca Censori’s wardrobe. The opening look of a black webby lace dress with vertical ruffles placed in a desultory manner was a foretaste of things to come: sheerness. Ms Chiuri has made see-through her house code for Dior, so she was happy to make sure that it was evident again, this time made more ‘luxe’ with the generous use of lace (which would be inevitably described as “decadent”), as if the openwork fabric would make the diaphanous clothes somehow less indecent, less distasteful, less showy. But while she usually showed black underpants under her filmy skirts, this time, she gave many of the models skin-coloured panties as if to suggest that they were wearing none. One strange look crossed into Dolce & Gabbana territory: a one-piece with a netted midriff that looked like a negligee/maillot/bathing suit. The poor model was the only one who had that much to wear. Was this the base garment before the other pieces were thrown on top and she was sent out before the dresser could finish her job?

Other Chiurisms that appeared included her usual work wear outers, truckers, pinafores (or were they aprons?), sundresses, belted jackets to evoke softer Bar jackets. To be fair, she did cough out one new silhouette: a sort of hybrid half shirt/half strapless top. It appeared in many configurations (there were at least 16 of them), and was evocative of the traditional Thai sabai, a one-shoulder-baring garment that wraps around the upper body. Dior’s were versions in lace and those in cotton poplin, and with one sleeve, both long and short. And if those might turn out to be a tad too advanced for the average Dior customer, Maria Grazia Chiuri offered shirts that could be worn to be slipped off at one shoulder. In all, the collection was styled to be pretty, uncontroversial, and accessible, all the better for their store windows, through which unexceptionable clothes can better lure customers to walk in and look at their Book totes. As one reader of SOTD texted us shortly after the livestream said, “She has only one collection and she just presses repeat.”

Screen shot (top) and photos: Dior