In a season where the fashion world often searches for immediacy, Maria Grazia Chiuri chooses to linger. For Dior’s Fall 2025 collection, the Creative Director eschews spectacle in favour of substance, drawing on the intimate relationship between garment and body, structure and soul, a narrative that threads through both architecture and couture.
Chiuri’s collection doesn’t merely present clothes; it poses a question. What happens when we treat the garment not as adornment, but as an architectural space? “The reality of a building is defined by its interior space, its living space, the space we inhabit,” she muses. “The same applies to architecture as to fashion.” Her latest work moves through this conceptual borderland, one where the body inhabits the garment just as a soul fills a space. It is, ultimately, a proposition of how identity and emotion are worn.
The reference points are expansive, but never vague. At its heart lies a transcontinental dialogue, between Western tailoring and Eastern form. The kimono, long admired in fashion’s annals for its poetic geometry, is elevated here into something both technically masterful and sensorially rich. The echoes of Monsieur Dior’s 1957 “Diorcoat,” designed to preserve the integrity of the kimono it was worn over, reverberate in Chiuri’s interpretation of the silhouette, now fuller, more fluid, yet rigorously considered.
But Chiuri does not borrow for ornament’s sake. Her exploration is rooted in cultural specificity and respectful homage. A 1971 journey to Tokyo by then-Dior designer Marc Bohan, and an encounter with the Kyoto exhibition Love Fashion: In Search of Myself, co-organised by the Kyoto Costume Institute, serve not as mere moodboard entries, but as touchstones for a deeper study of the relationship between fashion, the self, and societal form.
From this inquiry emerges a collection that reads like poetry in motion. Coats and jackets, oversized and embracing, wrap around the wearer like protective thoughts. Long skirts and wide-legged trousers flow not with the tempo of trend, but with the rhythm of lived experience. Fabrics range from whispering silks to textiles etched with scenes from Japanese gardens, a sublime cartography of memory and place.
There is a quietude in the colour palette, anchored in the profundity of black. But then there are moments of golden inlay, embroidered desires that shimmer like whispered secrets. Floral motifs, often heavy-handed in less deft collections, here carry symbolic weight. They are less decoration, more declaration, of resilience, of femininity, of the evolving idea of beauty.
The collection does not demand attention. It invites contemplation. In a fashion climate obsessed with provocation, Chiuri offers architecture, spaces to enter, garments to inhabit, stories to be lived in. The clothes propose not an identity to assume, but a canvas for one’s own.
In placing the body at the centre of her creative process, not merely as a mannequin, but as a vessel of identity and feeling, Chiuri crafts something rare: a collection of clothes that feel as if they were not just made for us, but with us in mind. Dior Fall 2025 is not merely worn. It is lived.
