It is official: Maria Grazia Chiuri is out of Dior. At last

Maria Grazia Chiuri walking down the runway at the end of the Dior cruise 2026 show three days ago

It is the worst-kept secret in the fashion world. After an agonising long wait, Dior has officially confirmed: Maria Grazia Chiuri is stepping down as its creative director. So many already people knew she would go. Even among non-fashion folks. Yet, it has taken Dior this long to make the announcement. It is unclear why there was a need for such a protracted departure. Some people we spoke to, including former Dior staffers, said it was to “control the narrative” and minimise the impact, as well as to allow Ms Chiuri a “respectful” exit. Business folks say that, since LVMH (Dior’s parent company) is publicly traded, they have to manage financial and investor considerations. But, if we remember correctly, when her predecessor Raf Simons announced that he was leaving Dior, he left almost immediately. It was not a long-drawn affair.

Raf Simons famously departed Dior in October 2015, citing “personal reasons” and a desire to focus on his own brand (which he eventually closed and then accepted the offer at Prada) and “passions” outside of work. Unlike what might have been a negotiated exit for Ms Chiuri (hence the “dramatic” swansong in Rome and a “pre-swansong” in Kyoto, as one marketing consultant called it), Mr Simons’s departure seemed more like a personal decision to step away from a system he found unsustainable. He told the media that the punishing pace and immense pressure of designing six collections a year at Dior had taken a significant toll on him. He felt he didn’t have sufficient “incubation time for ideas.”

From Ms Chiuri’s debut Dior collection, the beginning of her unsubtle messages

Ms Chiuri did not, it seemed, require the time. She could work speedily, churning out sellable ideas like the proverbial hot cakes, which were usually lacking in intensity of flavour. Her tenure at Dior was marked by significant commercial success and a deliberate focus on feminist messaging and collaborations with female artists. Yet, it is also true that her aesthetic has been a subject of considerable debate and criticism within the fashion world. We were looking at her first collection for Dior in 2016. The colour palette is near identical to her last, three days ago. And that shared the same chromatic choices and silhouettes as the collection a month before. How was it that she did not even bother to clearly distinguish between the Kyoto and the Rome shows? She did not bother to disprove that she deserved to go!

The minute it was confirmed that Jonathan Anderson would take over the Dior men’s collection, we knew Ms Chiuri was close to the exit door. Mr Anderson would not agree to doing just the men’s, we were sure, especially after handling all the lines at Loewe successfully. To be certain, there was, for quite a while, the co-ed anomaly at Dior. During John Galliano’s time, there was Hedi Slimane for Dior Homme. and then Kris van Assche, who continued as the line’s creative director throughout Raf Simons’s time, and then finally Kim Jones working opposite Maria Grazia Chiuri. Dior has not announced her successor. But the consolidation under Jonathan Anderson is expected, even if a notable shift for the house.

Photos: Dior