Dior aujourd'hui : où en est la maison

The silk faille bar jacket hanging in the Avenue Montaigne flagship — size 36, ivory with black grosgrain piping — has been there, in one form or another, for seventy-seven years. The proportions shift. The skirt lengthens, then shortens. But the jacket remains: nipped waist, rounded shoulder, a silhouette that still reads as Dior before you've seen the label. One wonders if that permanence is the house's greatest asset, or its most persistent constraint.

Christian Dior showed his first collection in February 1947. Carmel Snow, then editor of Harper's Bazaar, called it the New Look — a term Dior himself never used but couldn't escape. The collection was a rebuke to wartime austerity: full skirts requiring twenty metres of fabric, waists cinched to forty-eight centimetres, shoulders sloped and soft. It was, in effect, a return to the Belle Époque by way of mid-century construction. Dior built his house on that tension — nostalgia executed with surgical precision.

He died a decade later, in 1957, leaving behind a vocabulary so specific that every successor has had to negotiate it. Yves Saint Laurent took over at twenty-one and lasted six seasons. Marc Bohan held the role for twenty-nine years, a tenure defined more by steadiness than disruption. Then Gianfranco Ferré, then John Galliano, then Raf Simons, then Maria Grazia Chiuri. Each brought their own idiom, but the house dialect — that bar jacket, that A-line skirt, that vocabulary of volume and waist — remained audible beneath it all.

The Galliano Years and What Followed

Galliano's fifteen years at Dior, from 1996 to 2011, were operatic. The shows were productions: models in powdered wigs and crinolines, sets that referenced Versailles or Weimar Berlin, clothes that took the New Look and pushed it into something more fantastical. He understood Dior's theatricality and amplified it. The house's revenues grew accordingly. By the time he left — abruptly, after a filmed incident in a Paris bar — Dior was generating close to two billion euros annually, much of it from leather goods and beauty rather than couture.

Raf Simons arrived in 2012 with a different proposition. He stripped back the sets, favoured clean lines over historical pastiche, and brought a cooler, more architectural sensibility. His first show featured walls of fresh flowers — one million blooms, according to the house — and dresses that felt like modernist sculpture. The clothes were rigorous. The press was rapturous. But the tenure lasted only three and a half years. Simons left in 2015, citing the relentless pace of eight collections a year. One suspects he also found the weight of Dior's archive difficult to carry.

Maria Grazia Chiuri took over in 2016, the first woman to lead the house. Her appointment was symbolic, and she leaned into that symbolism. Her debut show opened with a model wearing a T-shirt that read We Should All Be Feminists, a slogan borrowed from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. The gesture was earnest, and it divided opinion. Some saw it as a necessary recalibration of a house built on male fantasy. Others found it reductive — fashion as placard rather than proposition.

The Current Proposition

Chiuri's Dior is softer than Simons', less austere than Ferré's, more wearable than Galliano's. She favours fluid fabrics, looser silhouettes, and frequent references to folk dress and historical femininity. The bar jacket appears, but often deconstructed or rendered in embroidered tulle. The waist remains, but it's no longer the focal point. There's an emphasis on craft — embroidery collaborations with Chanakya in Mumbai, lace from Maison Lognon in Paris — and a recurring interest in women artists and writers. Recent collections have referenced Leonora Carrington, Dora Maar, and the suffragette movement.

The commercial response has been unambiguous. Dior's fashion and leather goods division reported revenues of eight billion euros in 2022, up from roughly three billion when Chiuri arrived. The house is now the largest brand within LVMH's fashion group, outpacing even Louis Vuitton in certain quarters. The growth is driven largely by accessories — the Saddle bag, relaunched in 2018, became one of the decade's most recognisable silhouettes — and by a customer base that skews younger and more global than it did a decade ago.

Whether the clothes themselves have kept pace with that commercial success is a more contested question. Chiuri's runway work is competent, often beautiful in detail, but rarely urgent. The collections feel designed to please rather than provoke. There's a politeness to them, a reluctance to alienate. One can argue that this is strategic — Dior is a house that must dress red carpets, sell handbags, and maintain its position as a cultural institution — but it does mean the clothes rarely surprise.

The Apparatus Around the Clothes

Dior's influence today extends well beyond the runway. The house operates more than two hundred boutiques worldwide. Its beauty division, Parfums Christian Dior, is a separate entity within LVMH and one of the group's most profitable. The fragrance J'adore, launched in 1999, remains a bestseller. The makeup line is ubiquitous. The house sponsors art exhibitions, underwrites museum retrospectives, and maintains an active presence across every available platform. A single Instagram post from the official Dior account reaches tens of millions.

This apparatus requires constant feeding. Eight collections a year, as Simons noted. Countless collaborations, capsules, and special editions. A steady stream of celebrity ambassadors — currently including Jennifer Lawrence, Jisoo from Blackpink, and Anya Taylor-Joy — each of whom must be dressed, photographed, and circulated. The machinery is efficient, but it's also exhausting. One wonders if any creative director, however talented, can sustain a meaningful vision under such conditions.

The house's relationship with its archive is similarly complex. Dior references its own history more than most — the New Look is invoked constantly, the bar jacket reappears every few seasons, the atelier techniques are documented and celebrated. But this reverence can also feel like a cage. Every collection is measured against 1947, and every creative director is asked to honour the codes while also moving them forward. It's a difficult balance, and not always a productive one.

Where the House Stands

Dior today is solvent, visible, and culturally entrenched. It dresses more people, reaches more markets, and generates more revenue than at any point in its history. The clothes are well-made, the campaigns are polished, and the brand equity is formidable. Whether any of this constitutes a compelling creative vision is harder to say.

Chiuri's work is not without merit. Her emphasis on craft is genuine, her interest in historical women is sincere, and her instinct to make Dior more inclusive — more wearable, more accessible, more aligned with contemporary conversations about gender and power — is arguably necessary. But the result is a house that feels more managed than imagined. The shows are pleasant. The clothes are pretty. The message is clear. What's missing is risk.

Perhaps that's acceptable. Dior is not an avant-garde label; it's a commercial maison with shareholders, stakeholders, and a bottom line. Its job is to sell bags and dresses and perfume, and by that measure it's succeeding. But the house was also founded by a man who, in 1947, put women into skirts that required them to move differently, sit differently, inhabit space differently. That was a provocation, not a product. One wonders if the current iteration of Dior still has the appetite for that kind of gesture, or if the machinery has grown too large to permit it.

The ivory bar jacket is still there, on the Avenue Montaigne, waiting for its next iteration. It will be altered, updated, reinterpreted. The waist will shift, the fabric will change, the occasion will be different. But the jacket will remain, because that's what Dior does — it returns to the same silhouette, the same gesture, the same promise of transformation through cloth. Whether that's a strength or a limitation depends, in the end, on what you think fashion is for.