“Many young people hate fashion,” said the Dior designer Maria Grazia Chiuri, backstage before her grand show in the Tuileries garden that has opened Paris fashion week.
“They hate fashion because to them, brands are part of an establishment system which represents power,” she added, in an eye-catchingly frank insider assessment of fashion’s problematic status. Such candour is rare from titans of an industry where keeping up appearances is everything. But Chiuri’s strategy for increasing Dior’s relevance has been to engage with issues – from cultural appropriation, to the responsibility owed by fashion’s profit-makers to a global workforce of garment workers – to which fashion week mostly prefers to turn a blind eye.
