During her near-seven-year tenure as womenswear creative director of Dior, Maria Grazia Chiuri has forged a rich collaborative relationship with the art world – notably, with a series of women artists and creatives who reflect her own feminist approach to design. It began with a T-shirt printed with ‘We Should All Be Feminists’ in her debut S/S 2017 collection (the title of an essay by Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, who watched on from the front row); since, artistic collaborators have included Judy Chicago, Sharon Eyal, Mickalene Thomas and Grace Wales Bonner, among others, working on diverse projects including show sets, choreography, and one-of-kind garments.
It was little surprise, then, that Chiuri once again turned to a female artist to create the dramatic show set for her latest haute couture show held in Paris earlier today (3 July 2023). This time, it was Italian compatriot Marta Roberti (b. 1977), who lives and works in Chiuri’s birth city of Rome and is known for her meditative drawings which feature indistinct outlines and fragmented forms. ‘[It is the] primitive need to isolate shapes from an indefinite background from which they emerge and which can be disturbing,’ Roberti has previously said of her work, where recurring motifs include goddesses, animals, mythic landscapes and self-portraiture.
