Fashion and Feminist Art: Outside Voices in Maria Grazia Chiuri’s Dior Shows

Abstract

This article focuses on the public discourse of fashion and art, and the visibility of the political values implied by DIOR’s entry into public space through its collaboration with feminist art. I will explore the reshaping of feminist discourse through an analysis of designer Maria Grazia Chiuri’s (b. 1964) design practice for DIOR in recent years, and the feminist artworks that she incorporates into the shows. I will focus on three DIOR shows as examples: 2017 Spring/Summer Ready-to-Wear, 2020 Spring/Summer Haute Couture, and 2020 Fall/Winter Ready-to-Wear. These shows demonstrate that feminist art and fashion can become interdependent when they are used as rhetorical tools. While women cannot liberate themselves through consumption, clothing nevertheless serves as a rhetorical resource through which commodity culture can communicate and thereby create public spaces that allow women and fashion to become more valuable and defiant. I argue that while Chiuri’s design practice is a commercial success, it can also be used to resist the hegemony of gender domination. The discourse of art is often appropriated and manipulated by key players in the fashion industry, and if feminist art is a symbol of women taking power, Chiuri’s work demonstrates that it can be part of an effort to challenge the suppression of women’s voices in the public sphere while also highlighting the value and creativity of fashion.