Hello, Goodbye: Maria Grazia Chiuri’s Next Chapter

ROME — Human nature abhors a vacuum. Maria Grazia Chiuri’s status at the house of Dior has been the object of furious speculation for months now but in the absence of any confirmation from LVMH that the runway spectacle she staged in Rome on Tuesday night was her last hurrah at the brand, the audience made up its own mind. The designer was greeted with a rousing standing ovation when she walked out at the finale.

The heavens opened throughout the show, which has become something of a feature of Chiuri’s presentations when they’re exposed to the elements. A cockeyed optimist might construe that as nature’s equivalent of Tom Ford’s emotion-drenched send-off at Yves Saint Laurent — still the benchmark for the long fashion goodbye — but, deluge aside, the cheers felt like a necessary acknowledgement of Chiuri’s substantial near-decade achievement at Dior. As the only woman to carry Christian’s mantle, she leaves her thumbprint on the brand, financially and creatively.

Mind you, when to go gently into that good night may well have ultimately been her choice. All week, Chiuri appeared upbeat and relaxed, especially as she previewed a next act for journalists. (I’m assuming it’s not the next act, but it does involve a theatre, so the analogy seems appropriate). She was home, in Rome, the happy place of her birth where she would retreat from Paris every weekend, and where she has been realizing a rather wonderful personal project for the past few years.

Her renovation of the Teatro della Cometa, a bijou 233-seater in downtown Rome, is, in a way, an evolution of the commitment she always had at Dior to celebrating female creativity, from that very first show when a t-shirt quoted the title of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s essay “We Should All Be Feminists.” For years, she has wrapped her presentations in the work of women who inspired her. This time, it was Anna Laetitia (“Mimi”) Pecci-Blunt, the cultish art patron who was responsible for the construction of the Teatro in the annex of her family palazzo.

The inspiration felt particularly personal, perhaps because it was so embedded in Chiuri’s own story. The Palazzo Pecci-Blunt had always been a dream house for her. Once she found out about the house’s chatelaine, she transferred her obsession to Mimi, a woman whose wealth and privilege (her father was the nephew of Pope Leo XIII) effortlessly eased her passage through — and patronage of — the cultural ferment of the early-mid 20th century.

Mimi’s salon in Paris counted Picasso, Cocteau, Dali, Man Ray and Stravinsky among its habitués. When she and her American banker husband Cecil Blumenthal (she made him abbreviate his name to Blunt), acquired their palazzo in Rome in 1929, it also became a hive of artistic activity. Driven into exile by the fascists, the family sat out WWII in New York. On their return, she had the Teatro della Cometa designed (by Tomaso Buzzi) and constructed so that she would have a proper venue for the musical recitals she might once have presented in her home. She was also able to put on plays, performances and dance recitals. “She was really keen to share her passions with other people,” says Chiuri.

“I think for that time, Mimi was like Peggy Guggenheim,” Chiuri muses. “She really wanted to create an environment with all these creative people from several disciplines working together. I like the idea she tried to connect all these artists. You see the picture of Mr Dior in the café with Giacometti. He was a gallerist, she was a gallerist. That’s the way I really like to work too, with other artists to make a project, especially in this moment where everybody wants to talk about differences. I like the artists who try to collaborate. I think that’s a very important message.”

Chiuri translated the message into the collection she showed Tuesday night by getting both her studios — couture and ready-to-wear — to work with Studio Tirelli. Umberto Tirelli founded his workshop in the Sixties to work with the greatest movie directors of his day. From his archive of over 350,000 pieces of clothing, Chiurri picked 12 silhouettes to be worn by actors in the film that her frequent collaborator Matteo Garrone made for the livestream, as well as the performers who paraded ghost-like around the garden of the Villa Albani Torlonia in the lead-up to the show.

She was thinking about the Bal Blanc that Mimi staged in 1930 at her Paris home with Man Ray as co-host. Everyone wore white. Man Ray’s photos of “the party of the season” are preserved at the Centre Pompidou. The tableaux vivants that Chiuri has been staging at the Teatro for the past few days recreate the event. And the dress code on Tuesday was women in white, men in black. If that hints at the essential theatricality of Chiuri’s presentation, then my work here is done. The invitation proclaimed Rome as “Theatrum Mundi,” theatre of the world. (Feel the mycelium fingers reaching out to Teatro della Cometa.)

It’s an obvious question: would Chiuri have liked to live in Mimi’s moment? Her answer is an unequivocal yes. “Now we have too much Zoom, too many pictures. I think it’s so important to meet in person, to share ideas. This is exciting.” That’s why she was so keen for her studios to work with Tirelli. “For them, it was an experience that gave them a different perspective.”

Top of Chiuri’s moodboard was the cover of a book by Francesco Piccolo, “La Bella Confusione.” One “beautiful confusion” was the collection’s indistinguishable mix of cruise and couture (the show was officially labeled Cruise 2026, but tended more heavily towards couture, I’d say). The other is Rome itself, hectic, chaotic, enough to spark arguments between Chiuri and her husband Paolo when she defends the city’s profound dysfunction. “Paris is a beautiful city, but I’m Mediterranean and there is no sun in winter. You wake up in the dark and for someone who grew up in Rome, it is not simple not to have sun.” She counters that with praise for the fabulous, vital, cultural diversity of Paris. But still… sunshine.

But that professed umbilical connection to sensuality is why Chiuri’s collections have always been a bit of a puzzler, because they don’t often make that connection. They are pure and restrained and elegant and they embody an eerie kind of almost monastic luxury, but they aren’t sunshine. And so it was with what we are acknowledging as her last collection for Dior. It was almost as though she was recreating her own favourite bits, with a strong emphasis on her Valentino era (read into that what you want).

The elongated formality, the sheerness and delicacy of lace dresses with trains dragging through the rain-soaked gravel, the romantic tatters of Miss Havisham crochet… all of this had a costume-y Cinecittà allure. A leather motocross over a crystalled gown, a draped sheath in dull gold charmeuse, a black velvet cutaway jacket that looked moulded to the dress beneath: now these told a more provocative tale. The first time I met Chiuri, she and Pierpaolo Piccoli had just been to a Depeche Mode concert in Rome. That’s the kind of conversation you (or at least I) cling to in fashion, where you share something real.

And it fits with Chiuri’s own notion of beautiful confusion: a relationship between fashion and theatre and film and music where the boundaries dissolve. “You adapt the technique and the imagination when you work with different performers,” she says. “It’s exciting for the atelier because it’s a different way to think. What is dance? What is theatre? What is fashion? I like this idea of ‘la bella confusione.’”

So I’m thinking that points forward for Chiuri in a very positive way. As far as she’s concerned, the Teatro della Cometa is a family concern, something she will do with her husband and daughter Rachele. They’ve saved a little treasure from conversion to a supermarket or disco. “We didn’t want this incredible history to disappear,” Chiuri says. “There are so many antiquities in Rome, so much that it’s difficult for someone to make a stand for something so small.” But it is also a seductively quirky space. What other theatre stage can you think of that has six huge windows opening onto the street? “A dialogue with the city,” Chiuri calls it.

And then there’s her commitment to Mimi, whose archive is crying out for reactivation. “That’s what I am, an activator,” Chiuri declares, “not because I want to think about my future now — this doesn’t interest me — I think it’s much more interesting to reactivate something, to recreate. This is really beautiful for me.”

So, after nine years of reactivation at Dior, Maria Grazia Chiuri is maybe contemplating a brave new world of Mimi-driven cultural activism. Perhaps a gallery, definitely a theatre which promises a programme of provocative programming helmed by her daughter Rachele. Would she have been friends with Mimi? She answers without hesitation: “Absolutely.”

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