‘We should all be feminists’ – so read a T-shirt in Maria Grazia Chiuri’s debut show as womenswear creative director of Dior, shown in September 2016. It was a garment that would prove prescient to the Italian designer’s tenure at the house so far – for one, her collections have been infused with a celebration of powerful, creative femininity, and secondly, it was taken from a work by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, a precursor for the wide-ranging collaborations with women artists that have followed. These have included a show set by Judy Chicago, a photographic tome by Brigitte Niedermair, and the invitation to Grace Wales Bonner to give her riff on the house’s bar jacket as part of Chiuri’s Cruise 2020 collection.
