Fat Anna Wintour’s Fashion Squeeze: Why Do People Hate One of Luxury Fashion’s Only Female Creative Directors?

Words: Anastasia Vartanian

Many moons ago, during one of the lockdowns, I made a YouTube video titled Why do people hate Maria Grazia Chiuri? For those not chronically part of the online fashionsphere, Maria Grazia Chiuri has been creative director of Dior womenswear since 2016. She was also one of the only female creative directors at the helm of a luxury fashion brand.

Coincidentally, she was the villain of High Fashion Twitter. People really hated her. The TL didn’t go a day without calling for her to step down, or claiming that Monsieur Christian Dior was rolling in his grave upon seeing her designs. (I almost certainly made a joke along those lines.) Well, we got our wish recently when she left her position after almost a decade. People, naturally, reacted with memes. It’s a little cruel – how would you feel if ten years of your work culminated with people cheering your departure? – but I’d be a liar if I said I didn’t find some of them funny.

So, why did people hate her so much? It’s not like her designs were offensively bad. There are arguably other designers that show more egregious or tacky things. To be honest, upon looking back through her work, I was actually struck by how some looks were quite lovely, beautiful even. But, for the most part, her Dior was beige: literally and figuratively. Yes, there was gorgeous embroidery and rich materials, but the clothes didn’t have a strong identity. 

Having the reins of the house of Dior comes with huge shoes to fill. Put simply, MGC’s Dior just wasn’t… cunty. When you’re constantly being compared to the shadow of John Galliano, that’s going to be a problem. Galliano was creative director of Dior from 1996 to 2011, and frequently shocked and titillated with his designs. His shows were grand operas, taking you from the Belle Époque to Ancient Egypt. At times romantic, at others provocative. In comparison, Chiuri’s Dior felt bland, lacking in excitement and fantasy. 

When fashion is entertainment, being boring is worse than being bad. Nowadays, fashion is consumed through screens as much as on the shop floor. Fashion shows and commentary began to be televised decades ago, but social media created a whole new, mass forum for fashion. It created a generation of fashion fans who were raised on the theatrics of Galliano, Alexander McQueen, Vivienne Westwood and Thierry Mugler, retroactively consumed on Pinterest, Tumblr and YouTube. 

In comparison to the drama of yore, contemporary fashion felt flat and commercial. Creative directors like Chiuri were symbols of this. So, fashion fans aired their grievances, on sites like Twitter or Instagram. Other villains of High Fashion Twitter included Virginie Viard at Chanel, and, to a lesser extent, Sarah Burton at Alexander McQueen. Interestingly, both were also women who were frequently compared to their male predecessors – Viard to Karl Lagerfeld and Burton to Alexander McQueen.

But, perhaps, Chiuri did exactly what she was tasked to do. Maybe, we wanted Dior to be something it isn’t anymore. The days of wild shows are gone, when Galliano frequently made the headlines for his racy fashion and even sometimes attracted protestors to the Dior store. At the time Bernard Arnault, CEO of Dior parent company and luxury fashion giant LVMH, wanted Dior to make the headlines. He needed to shake up the old fashion house and cement it on the world stage as cool and desirable.

By the early 2010s, Galliano had more than achieved this goal. Dior was a famous, global brand – second only to Louis Vuitton in LVMH’s portfolio. So, by the time he had his anti-semitic outburst in 2011, the designer had already served his purpose. Now, he was a liability. Alexander McQueen had sadly died the year before. The executives of both LVMH and Kering (which owns the Alexander McQueen brand) realised that star designers could be ultra talented, but extremely troubled. Paired with the immense pressure of creativity under a corporate schedule, this led to disastrous results and, inevitably, bad press

So, it was time to go safe. Creative directors were often hired from within the company – reliable people who did the job and mostly kept to themselves, and who didn’t have the same celebrity status outside of the fashion industry. Now that these brands were consolidated as household names, there was only one thing left to do: sell, sell, sell. And to do that, you don’t need bizarre shows which verge on grand theatre productions. You need product. Early on in her career, Chiuri helped to create the Fendi baguette, which would go on to become an iconic accessory. Perhaps this looked good on her CV.

The facts are that Dior womenswear did well under Chiuri, financially. A HSBC report estimated that Dior’s revenue almost quadrupled from 2018 to 2023 – from 2.7 billion euros to over 9 billion. It’s difficult to quantify exactly how much of that was due to her designs, since there are many factors, not least a revealing scandal about Dior from last year. This included a report that bags which sold for €2,700 cost €53 to make. But that’s less to do with creative direction and more with corporate greed.

“The facts are that Dior womenswear did well under Chiuri, financially. A HSBC report estimated that Dior’s revenue almost quadrupled from 2018 to 2023 – from 2.7 billion euros to over 9 billion.”

We can’t talk about Chiuri’s time at Dior without talking about feminism. Her first show, spring/summer 2017, set the tone, with t-shirts bearing the slogan “We should all be feminists.” Another show, autumn/winter 2020, had slogans above the runway that read: “Patriarchy = oppression”, “Consent”, “Patriarchy = CO2”, “Patriarchy = climate emergency” and “We are all clitoridian women”.

To her credit, the “We should all be feminists” quote is from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, a Nigerian feminist author. “Clitoridian women” is a concept about female sexuality from Italian art critic Carla Lonzi. And, indeed, patriarchy does equal oppression and climate emergency, and consent is important. But I think anyone who’s around my age would agree that these slogans, or at least the use of them, feels a bit dated. It was the time of mid 2010s commodified feminism, when pussy hats were a thing. And such earnestness was always going to clash with the sensibilities of the painfully ironic younger gens. Naturally, the “we should all be feminists” t-shirt has since taken on a meme status.

Under Chiuri, Dior started a women’s mentorship program in 2017. So she did, in a way, put her money where her mouth is. And she frequently collaborated with women artists. But despite all this, I couldn’t help notice that it’s a very particular type of woman she featured on her runways. At the time of her debut show, she told Vogue Runway: “The message, really, is that there is not one type of woman.” Which is great, but falls a little flat because I don’t think I ever saw a plus-size model on a Dior runway, something which most other luxury brands at least made a half-assed attempt at doing. The only plus-size moment I can think of is the custom looks Dior made for the singer Yseult – which were, in fairness, great.

She’s no stranger to calls of cultural appropriation or white feminism either, like the time Dior cast Jennifer Lawrence in the campaign for a collection inspired by Mexican women horse riders. All of this widened her disconnect with Gen Z and worsened her standing online. But the Dior execs didn’t care about that: what zoomer is spending £4000 on a dress? (Unless they have a trust fund, and in that case they’d be shopping at Dover Street Market.) 

“Chiuri made clothes for moneyed women of a certain age who want to look elegant, but not exactly push any fashion boundaries.”

So… did people hate Chiuri for being a woman? I’d like to think most sane people didn’t. But I do think there’s something to be said about the kind of fashion we view as valid in the online community. We live for the drama, but not necessarily wearable clothes that women who aren’t 25 and 100 lbs could feel comfortable in. Chiuri made clothes for moneyed women of a certain age who want to look elegant, but not exactly push any fashion boundaries. Not everyone wants a vintage Mugler suit with huge shoulders and a tiny waist, or McQueen bumster trousers which show off the asscrack. 

At the end of the day, innovating fashion is not what this billion dollar industry is about. Product is king. At least for these huge corporations, fashion isn’t art – it’s business. But making that too obvious doesn’t go over well with the people. So, perhaps Dior’s new appointment, Jonathan Anderson, can better tread this line between clothes that capture people’s attention and products to be sold. 

For a younger generation, I think Maria Grazia Chiuri at Dior, Virginie Viard at Chanel and Sarah Burton at McQueen became symbols of this “corporate” fashion. Symbols of what these houses no longer are. And for that, they got a lot of hate.