Maria Grazia Chiuri takes Mexico’s fearless escaramuzas as inspiration for Cruise collection melding romance and feistiness

Who hasn’t struggled with what to wear to a first interview? What about that first day’s work experience? It was this most functional of dilemmas that sparked Dior’s dreamy resort show – just your average catwalk situation in the moated stables of the impossibly grand Chateau de Chantilly, 55 km from Paris.

It was creative director Maria Grazia Chiuri’s daughter Raquelle who prompted the debate, when she asked her mother for sartorial advice for her first day as an intern. “She had this idea that she wouldn’t be able to dress like herself – that there was some mould she had to fit,” says Chiuri. “Women always feel they have to change themselves to get on in life. I wanted to show that there are so many different ways to be strong.”

For her starter manual, Chiuri turned to traditional Mexican horsewomen. It’s extraordinary how potent a fashion force the equestrian world has been, but the Escaramuzas, traditional Mexican elite riders who perform adrenaline-charged choreographed dances on horseback, don’t often get a look in.

They should. Their kit is as startlingly feminine as they are fearless – as the audience, sitting in a fine downpour in a semi open aired riding school, got to see when a dozen Escaramuzas on highly trained greys pranced around the models. Delicately embroidered bodices, full, tiered skirts, jaunty, large brimmed hats-clearly they never felt the need to compromise their womanliness simply because they’d been granted the right to compete in a macho world.

Grazia Chiuri borrowed it all- and the Dior workrooms went to town. Tiny fairy stitches in white depicting exotic Mexico’s native flowers and fauna rambled across black skirts made from layers of fine tulle  and filmy chiffon blouses. Waists were cinched in with the Escaramuzas’s signature wide black leather purse belts –another cult Dior accessory hits pay-dirt.  

Dior’s famous Bar Jacket- which first appeared as part of Christian Dior’s New Look in 1947– has been updated in cotton. No horsehair padding, no boning – so stripped back that if they were a song they’d be the acoustic version. Interview and work wear quagmire sorted. Footwear, including a rubberised biker-boot-riding-boot hybrid with an internal sock (“unbelievably comfortable” according to its designer) was flat.

It’s a cliché – not always true – that female designers make more women friendly clothes than their male counterparts. But Grazia Chiuri, the first woman at the top of Dior in 70 years,  meshes Christian Dior’s intensely romantic lushness, with a feisty 2018 sensibility. “Fantasy has to be applicable to real life” she asserts. That made Isabel Allende, Chile’s maestro of magic realisim an apt literary inspiration for this collection – not an explicitly feminist voice as previous muses Chiuri have been, but she didn’t need to be. Those fearless Escaramuzas said it all.