The fog drifted in over the manicured lawns of the Villa Albani Torlonia in Rome just as the Dior Cruise 2026 show began, lending what was already a somewhat surreal moment an extra-otherworldly air.

All the female guests wore white, even Natalie Portman and Rosamund Pike; the men, black.

As they entered the verdant inner courtyard of the private manse, with its collection of Greco-Roman antiquities, they walked past dancers posed like moving statuary.

When the first models appeared, to the strains of a live orchestra, light rain began to fall.

Along with the mist, it made the clothes, almost all ivory and often so light as to be practically transparent, seem ghostly (even for someone watching through the computer screen): an ethereal stew of references in lace, silk and velvet – with the occasional tailcoat – to different periods in history and imagination.

In a video call before the show, the designer, Maria Grazia Chiuri, said she had been after what she called “beautiful confusion”, the phrase (co-screenwriter) Ennio Flaiano originally suggested as a title for (director Federico) Fellini’s 8 1/2. 

It was an apt description, not just of the collection itself, which seemed made for phantoms slipping from one era into the next, but also of the question mark surrounding her own situation.

Read more: What led to Jonathan Anderson’s sudden appointment as head of Dior menswear?

Chiuri had nominally brought Dior back to her home city to celebrate the romantic spirits that formed her (and helped shape fashion), from La Cinecitta to director Pier Paolo Pasolini and Mimi Pecci-Blunt, an early 20th-century patroness of the arts who built a private theatre Chuiri recently restored.

But she also brought herself and her audience full circle, back to the place she began.

To do so, she enlisted a host of collaborators: the Tirelli costume house, director Matteo Garrone (who made a short film in honour of the collection), artist Pietro Ruffo, Dutch choreographers Imre and Marne Van Opstal.

If that sounds like a lot to cram into what was essentially a 20-minute fashion experience, it was on purpose.

It is widely accepted in fashion that this was Chiuri’s last show for Dior. That in a matter of days the house will announce she is leaving after nine years and will be replaced by Jonathan Anderson, who recently joined Dior as artistic director of menswear.

LVMH, which owns the house, has not addressed the rumours, and when asked directly, Chiuri simply said, “Oh, I don’t answer this question.”

It’s too bad. The lack of clarity about her future, combined with the actual fog, gave an ambiguous edge to what could have been a triumphant farewell. Instead it seemed like a vaguely elegiac swan song.

Maria Grazia Chiuri, creative director of Dior waves at the end of the Dior Cruise 2026 womenswear show at Villa Albani Torlonia, in Rome. Photo: AFPMaybe they are hedging for legal reasons. Maybe Chiuri, who has the thick skin and stubbornness of many pioneers, didn’t want it to be nostalgic or sentimental.

But while the collection was lovely and she got a standing ovation, it could have been so much more.

It could have been an exclamation point at the end of what will surely be seen as a meaningful era in the life span of a major brand. A celebration of the contribution of the first woman to run the house.

Such a farewell is not unheard-of in fashion, even if designers now turn over so often and so brusquely that it seems rarer than not.

Tom Ford ended his Gucci period with a shower of pink rose petals, a standing ovation and Nothing Compares 2 U. Dries Van Noten went out on a silver foil runway with a giant disco ball to commemorate the moment.

There’s nothing wrong with designers being recognised for what they brought to a brand, even if, as in this case, the decision to part ways doesn’t seem to be entirely mutual.

Especially a designer like Chiuri, who both helped grow Dior to what is estimated to be close to US$9bil (approximately RM38.2bil) in revenue and expanded its identity more than anyone may have realised.

She is quoted in the documentary Her Dior – a study of Chiuri’s work with female artists directed by Loïc Prigent and released in March (an early sign, perhaps, of legacy building) – saying she knew what she was doing. She did.

She used her power and position, the financial might of her company, not just to assert a somewhat hackneyed feminism (who could forget the slogan tees or the weird playsuits under princess dresses?), but also to support a variety of female artists as well as a panoply of artisans.

To insist on the radical idea that craft belonged on the same level as couture. And, perhaps most significantly of all, to break the stranglehold of the "new look".

Indeed, in Her Dior, Chiuri said she told the Dior executives when she was hired that the brand’s most signature silhouette, with its cinching and constriction of the female figure, was not for her.

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To look back at her collections is to see her methodically dismantling it.

She did so first by going through the motions of loosening the stays – figuring out how to preserve the shape without the restrictive underpinnings – and then by eschewing it entirely.

Her strength as a designer wasn’t in the giant productions that surrounded her collections but in the internal magic she worked with construction and material. It’s why her work often seemed more enticing in previews, experienced up close, than on the runway, where it could look banal.

It is worth noting that there was not a single bar jacket in the whole cruise show. Or a high heel.

Instead it was strewed with Easter eggs that suggested a finale: references to Chiuri-isms past (to the short film she and Garrone made during Covid-19 and to the dancers she had included in other shows); to a possible future (her work with the Roman theatre); to the goodbye of her colleague, former Dior menswear designer Kim Jones, who resigned after his January show (as in that show, some of Chiuri’s models were wearing blindfolds).

Even the inclusion of 31 couture looks among the ready-to-wear seemed a last word of sorts.

Couture is the next season on the womenswear schedule, and it would have been Chiuri’s next collection, if there actually were one.

For now there was just the Cruise 2026 show’s closing look: an extraordinary gown micro-beaded to resemble a trompe l’oeil heroic torso. Or a relic, perhaps, of a time gone by. – ©2025 The New York Times Company

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.