Christian Dior Spring 2025 Ready-to-Wear Collection

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Christian Dior Spring 2025 Ready-to-Wear Collection

The Italian artist and competitive archer Sagg Napoli shot arrows at a target as the models did their circuit at Christian Dior today. Glass partitions separated her from the audience for safety, but they didn’t lessen the fierceness of her performance. Napoli, whose real name is Sofia Ginevra Gianni, wore a one-shoulder bodysuit and car wash miniskirt from Maria Grazia Chiuri’s new collection and her muscles contracted and released with each release of her bow. There’s never been anything like her on a Paris runway before.

Since her arrival at Dior in 2016, Chiuri has referenced a long list of strong women, but Napoli is the first whose power manifested in such a physical way. She was a sort of contemporary avatar for the women warriors of ancient mythology that Chiuri said she took as muses this season. From Diana the Huntress to Wonder Woman to Napoli—that’s the through line.

Representations of all of them were pinned to Chiuri’s moodboard in the Dior studio, along with an autumn 1951 look, with suggestions of formal riding attire, that Christian Dior dubbed the Amazone. Chiuri was making links between ancient Greece’s peplos, a simple draped garment she’s often referenced, and the house founder’s rigorous tailoring. The connective tissue was the slicing diagonal lines suggestive of movement and agility, qualities that have not often been connected with the idea of womanhood and femininity.

In some ways, this was a return to Chiuri’s debut for spring 2017, which used the language of sport to convey its sense of freedom and set the groundwork for her feminist project. Here, archery replaced fencing, but the athleticism of the clothes seemed mostly influenced by the street and the way modern women wear their exercise gear out of the gym and in the other parts of their lives, in part because nothing else is as comfortable. Here, bodysuits were styled under semi-transparent dresses, blazers were paired with mesh track pants, and jackets were crisscrossed with parachute straps. For shoes, many of the models wore knee-high gladiator boots.

Accenting the collection’s more traditional ready-to-wear was a circa 1970-’71 graphic Dior logo. With its exaggerated vertical lines, somehow evocative of a movie title sequence, it conveyed aerodynamism and speed. The same goes for the jackets and shirts that were cut to fall off of one shoulder, with the added element of sexual allure. Some of these shoulder-exposing jackets and shirts were accessorized with gauntlet gloves that inched past the elbows to almost the shoulders, a look lifted—believe it or not—from a 1949 Dior show.

“Myths tell us you have to renounce your femininity to be strong and to be right,” Chiuri said at a preview, “but Sagg says no, you don’t have to renounce your femininity to be strong.” Chiuri’s collection successfully inverted that idea: You don’t have to renounce your strength to be feminine.

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