''We should all be feminists''

On Saturday, while 673 women’s marches were taking place in cities across the world, Maria Grazia Chiuri, the new artistic director of Christian Dior, was fitting her spring/summer 2017 couture collection in Paris. She was wearing a T-shirt from her first Dior collection printed with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s line “We Should All Be Feminists,” worn underneath a black wool “Bar” jacket from the same collection, whose name and curvaceous silhouette is an homage to the tailleur Bar, a suit from Dior’s 1947 debut. Fashion often echoes the mood of the times, subconsciously or otherwise. Yves Saint Laurent designed a collection inspired by the May 1968 Paris riots; by contrast, Dior’s “New Look” was a salve for the wounds of wartime, making people forget the hardships and revel in luxury. For her collection, Chiuri interprets the “New Look” again, in ivory organza with a peplum of pleats above wide chiffon culottes. It’s an ensemble whose inherent lightness and elastic ease of movement feels like a reflection of that juxtaposition of contemporary feminism (the slogan T-shirt) and historical throwback (the Bar jacket) currently on her own back.