Maria Grazia Chiuri and the History of Women at Dior

Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel never did things by halves. When asked her opinion on Christian Dior’s “New Look” — the shorthand for the wasp-waisted, full-skirted silhouette Dior introduced to furor, acclaim and near universal adoption in his debut collection of 1947 — she snapped: “Look how ridiculous these women are, wearing clothes by a man who doesn’t know women, never had one, and dreams of being one.”

She was, perhaps, correct on the latter two points — but the first, not so. Yet her opinion has hung around until today, forming a contemporary image of Christian Dior in the traditional, autocratic mold of couturier-as-dictator, capriciously decreeing transformations of hemline and shape. A Svengali manipulating his Trilby, corseting women to a man’s vision of how they should look.

But in fact Dior’s vision was guided, by his own admission, by a retinue of women whose opinions helped form the aesthetic Dior (and the world) called his own. The common parlance was to call them the “three muses,” although Dior himself termed them his “mothers” — a trio of women who effectively gave birth to him as a couturier. Little known outside of the fashion world, this couture coterie can be credited with defining Dior as we know it then. Given the strength of the house’s connection to and respect for its history, they still determine its contemporary identity. These women were the power behind Dior’s throne.

First, there was Madame Raymonde Zehnacker — or Madame Raymonde, as she was deferentially referred to within the company. Officially, she was director of the design studio, but Dior himself ascribed her a far more expansive role. In his autobiography, he dubbed her “reason to my fantasy, order to my imagination, discipline to my freedom.” In short, she was the iron fist in the velvet glove who ensured the entire house of Dior ran efficiently. Dior’s term for her was, simply, “my second self.”

The second was Marguerite Carré, the technical director of Dior, poached from the house of Patou in an act of industrial espionage when Dior first opened in 1946. She brought with her a substantial staff of 30 seamstresses (the house of Dior, in its original entirety, only had a staff of 60). Patou lodged an official complaint regarding the move — the final details were hammered out under the supervision of the Chambre Syndicale, haute couture’s governing body, to prevent a Montague/Capulet situation between the two Parisian houses. Again, Dior referred to Carré as “part of myself… my ‘dressmaking’ self.” Dior himself was a dreamer, not a draper, preferring to sketch rather than manipulate fabric directly (his rival, Cristobal Balenciaga, always included a black dress made by his own hands in each collection). Carré was the woman who made it work.

The final woman, Mitzah Bricard, was arguably the most compelling — and has cast the longest shadow. The company has subsequently named a perfume after her, and she was the inspiration behind John Galliano’s first couture collection for the house some 20 years ago. Ostensibly head of the millinery atelier, Bricard was, effectively, Dior’s muse. She rarely arrived at the studio before midday, habitually clad in ropes and pearls and leopard-print, both of which continue as house leitmotifs. Her wrist was bandaged with a silk scarf, to hide a scar from a suicide attempt; one of her sayings (she had many) was: “When a man wants to send you flowers, always say — ‘my florist is Cartier.’” “Madame Bricard is one of the rare people for whom elegance is their sole reason for living,” wrote Dior — and he relied on her to bring it to his collections.

Now, there’s a new woman at Dior. Maria Grazia Chiuri made history, before she even showed a stitch, by becoming the house’s first female creative director in its 70-year history. She writ her feminist inclinations large and literal on a T-shirt in her debut Friday afternoon; it was espoused on the soundtrack too, via the Beyoncé song “Flawless,” which samples a speech by the feminist author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

Given this back story, Chiuri’s appointment isn’t so radical: The house has a past dominated by women. And while Bricard couldn’t have been described, by any stretch of the imagination, as a feminist (she denounced postwar socialites by stating that they would go to bed with a man “for a cafe crème”), Chiuri must have been thinking of her — and her counterparts — as she designed this collection. Bricard and Dior’s fellow “mothers” may have been, officially, behind the masculine head, but the heart of the house of Dior has always been female.

It’s interesting that Dior, frequently, referred to these singular women as variations on himself. Perhaps he saw them as his own feminine incarnation — as Chanel put it, the women he dreamed of being. Or maybe he wisely reasoned that, to answer the eternal, Freudian, conundrum: “What does woman want?” — the best thing to do is actually ask a woman. Especially when it comes to the clothes on her back.