Paris (AFP) – Dior announced Thursday that Italian designer Maria Grazia Chiuri was stepping down as artistic director of the French fashion house’s women’s collection after almost a decade on the job. Dior has boomed since Chiuri took over in 2016, becoming the second-biggest brand in the stable of luxury labels owned by French powerhouse LVMH. The 61-year-old designer’s modernisation and feminist activism helped attract new customers.
Chiuri, who was the first woman to be named Dior’s creative director after a career at Italian brands Valentino and Fendi, had long been rumoured to be on her way out. “The House of Dior wishes today to express its deepest gratitude to Maria Grazia Chiuri after a wonderful collaboration as Artistic Director of the Women’s collections since 2016,” Dior said in a statement. “After nine years, I am leaving the House of Dior, delighted by the extraordinary opportunity I have been given,” Chiuri said in the statement.
Northern Irish designer Jonathan Anderson, who was named creative director of Dior Men last month, has been tipped as a possible successor, which would make him the first person to head both the men’s and women’s collections. If that came to be, it would give “greater consistency” between the men’s and women’s offerings and would be “impactful for the public and for consumers,” said Serge Carreira, an academic specialising in the luxury industry. Already anticipation is building around Anderson’s first Dior menswear show in June.
Chiuri on Tuesday presented Dior Women’s 2026 Cruise collection in Rome, the city of her birth, in an 18th century villa. The show concluded with a standing ovation for the designer. Guests at the event included Silvia Venturini Fendi, granddaughter of Fendi’s founders and the menswear artistic director of the brand, and Valentino founder Valentino Garavani.
After training at Italy’s Istituto Europeo di Design, Chiuri worked for Fendi in the 1990s before joining Valentino in 1999, where she and artistic partner Pier Paolo Piccioli became creative co-directors. In 2016, she was tapped to succeed Raf Simons at Dior, and “she really wrote a whole chapter in Dior’s history,” said Carreira, who teaches at Paris’s Sciences Po university. Even if some critics argued that she lacked creativity, he disagreed, saying: “She managed to boost and create a very consistent identity at Dior Women…that she constantly refreshed and fed with new ideas.”
Speculation already swirled around Chiuri’s future at her last Paris Fashion Week in March. Her face was inscrutable at the end of a 25-minute Fall/Winter 2025 show in the Tuileries Gardens, as she briefly acknowledged applause from a crowd that was relatively low on A-list celebrities.
Some observers had suggested the classic French house was growing stale. Its growth is of crucial financial and dynastic importance to LVMH owner Bernard Arnault, who placed his daughter Delphine in charge of Dior in February 2023. In the Dior statement, Delphine Arnault praised Chiuri’s “immense work with an inspiring feminist viewpoint and exceptional creativity.”
Speaking to Grazia magazine in February, Chiuri said she had seen the fashion business change greatly over her 40-year career. “Fashion used to be about family companies and there were small audiences – clients and buyers,” she said. “Now fashion is like a channel. It’s something more popular, it’s like pop. It’s a form of media.”
LVMH’s global first-quarter results were weaker than expected, with sales over the period dropping two percent against the backdrop of trade uncertainty unleashed by US President Donald Trump’s tariffs. French group Hermes overtook LVMH as the world’s most valuable luxury company in April after shares in the Louis Vuitton maker tumbled following weaker-than-expected quarterly sales. LVMH shares have been sliding since the end of February.
© 2024 AFP
