Dior bows in Rome with Maria Grazia Chiuri's cinematic Cruise collection
Chiuri, Dior's first female artistic director and one of the most commercially successful in its modern history, exercised rare directive control over her audience: guests were asked to observe a formal dress code — white for women, black for men. A curatorial move in keeping with the collection's muse: cinema, memory, and couture as a form of storytelling.
What followed was a procession of 80 looks that blurred the lines between ready-to-wear and haute couture. The first 24 exits — exclusively in shades of white, sheer, embroidered or sequined — evoked what WWD aptly termed the 'Renaissance princess.' The purity of palette gave way to a succession of crimson and black velvet column dresses, interspersed with androgynous outerwear — a silhouette dialectic Chiuri has made her own.
Adding gravitas to the mise-en-scène was a collaboration with famed Roman costume atelier Tirelli, whose archive includes costuming for Luchino Visconti's The Leopard and Martin Scorsese's The Age of Innocence . 'We wanted not only to experiment, but also with this lightness, to show that the construction behind a film costume is very close to haute couture,' Chiuri told WWD, underlining the collection's technical rigour and narrative ambition.
Under her nine-year tenure, Chiuri not only repositioned Dior as a platform for feminist and artisanal dialogue, but also delivered some of the highest commercial returns in the brand's modern history. As the first major acquisition by LVMH founder Bernard Arnault, Dior now occupies a central role in the group's luxury portfolio — both symbolically and strategically.
Her presumed departure, though not officially confirmed, has been the subject of industry speculation for months. Sources close to LVMH suggest that Jonathan Anderson, currently at Loewe, will assume full creative control across both womenswear and haute couture — a consolidation that signals significant confidence but also immense responsibility. On her own terms
With Anderson's first Dior Homme collection expected to debut at Paris Men's Fashion Week in June, analysts anticipate an imminent announcement from LVMH. The decision to allow Chiuri to close her chapter on her own terms — in Rome, among ruins and cinematic references — reflects the house's reverence for her legacy, and an awareness of the delicate optics of succession.
The Cruise collection, masterful in execution and subtle in farewell, functioned not just as a collection, but as a thesis on what Chiuri brought to Dior: narrative couture grounded in history, articulated with intellect and emotional force. Whether Anderson will inherit that lens or reshape it entirely remains to be seen — but one thing is certain: a new era at Dior is already unfolding.
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Sky News
5 hours ago
- Sky News
The 'stealth shoppers' keeping pricey secrets from their partners - and what it says about their relationships
Hanging in Sally's* cupboard is a £3,000 Dior coat. It is also a secret, and her husband doesn't know about it. "It has yet to make an outing. It will do shortly," she tells Money. "I got the assistant to put it on hold for three months. I saved and bought it without my partner knowing about it. I did not need another coat as I have several." And while he has spotted it in her cupboard - though not on any bank statements because they keep separate accounts - he has never said anything. "It's not going to surprise him, as things do appear, and my wardrobe has investment pieces in it," she says, clarifying that investment usually translates to "expensive". "If he had to guess the value of my wardrobe, he would guess within £10,000 of the value. His guess would be conservative." According to a recent survey, nearly two-thirds of Americans who live with a spouse or significant other have hidden a purchase in the past year - known as "stealth shopping" - and it seems Britons are no different. Brands even sometimes encourage it - the upmarket Fairfax & Favor has an "alibi box" you can tick when you place an order. "We'll include a tongue-in-cheek cunning little note saying your goodies are a competition prize or gift - pick your excuse and they need never know the truth," the brand promises. 'He hoped I wouldn't notice the TV had grown overnight' For Alice*, a woman in her 40s living in Devon, it was her husband who tried to sneak a new television into the house. "He told our daughter he'd bought a new, bigger TV for Christmas and not to tell Mummy," she says, explaining that he waited until she had fallen asleep before getting it out of the car and swapping it with their old one. "He hoped I just wouldn't notice the TV had grown in size overnight." After a discussion, she says she eventually dropped it, instead using it as a bargaining tool to get him to remove their surround sound. "I think it's about choosing your battles," she says. "I wasn't going to win this but I could get something I wanted out of it. "He knew I would never have agreed to the new TV if we'd discussed the purchase." 'When I do spend, I feel a bit guilty' Natalie says she doesn't think her husband would even care, but she still finds herself downplaying her purchases, with one of the latest being tickets to the Strictly Come Dancing live shows. "My boys are obsessed with Strictly and it's one of the few things we all watch together as a family. For the four of us, it was £340, which is the most I've ever spent on tickets for an event," she tells Money. "I know my husband would think it's outrageous, so I told him it was 'reasonable' and he didn't ask the exact price." Natalie downplays purchases, she says, because she doesn't want to justify the cost if she has "consciously researched and thought about what I am buying". In part, she attributes this to her upbringing - she grew up in a working-class family that didn't have much extra money. "My parents always saved for holidays and spent any extra cash on that, so they didn't spend on 'luxuries' or expensive things - even now they love a bargain," she says. "I think that made me quite frugal with money sometimes. So when I do spend on something I consider to be a luxury or an investment, I feel a bit guilty even though I'm not spending more than I can afford." Natalie also struggles with the wage disparity between her and her husband. She runs a small business and also works for a charity, taking home about 25% of the salary her husband, a lawyer, does (they both pool the majority of their money together in a joint account). "I do more of the childcare and household stuff and when my children were younger, I worked part-time to be around more for them," she says. "So we are both contributing in different ways but financially I'll never earn as much as him. Why we do it... 'Money isn't just about numbers' Catherine Morgan, a financial coach, author and wellbeing speaker, says hiding purchases can be a way of avoiding difficult conversations about our financial values. "The relationship we have with money is really a mirror reflection of the relationship we have with ourselves," she says. "Therefore, the need to hide purchases often stems from our deep-rooted emotional relationship with money. "When we hide purchases, we're usually not just concealing the items themselves, but responding to underlying feelings of shame, guilt or fear of judgement. "We worry what people might say, which will often exaggerate these feelings. Money isn't just about numbers - it's deeply intertwined with our identity, values, and a deep sense of security." It can be a "significant issue", she says, as it may signal "deeper challenges" in a relationship. And while the odd pair of shoes may not seem a problem, hiding purchases can be problematic when it starts to affect your emotional wellbeing, with warning signs including anxiety, guilt and consistently hiding purchases and bank statements. Your relationship with money Like all relationships, our one with money can always be "healed and improved", Morgan says. She recommends exploring what triggers your spending habits and what emotions arise when you feel the need to hide purchases. "Often it comes alongside feelings of boredom, stress or even hunger," she says. "Understanding your nervous system's response to money matters is crucial. "When we feel financial shame or anxiety, our body often goes into a stress response - heart racing, shallow breathing or feeling overwhelmed. "Learning to recognise these physical signs can help you pause before making impulsive purchases. "Simple practices like deep breathing or taking a mindful moment before spending can help regulate your nervous system and create space for more conscious financial decisions."
Economist
6 hours ago
- Economist
The largest dig in a lifetime is under way in Pompeii
Culture | Roman, not ruins What lies beneath the pumice in the ancient city is magnificent Was he her lover? The two skeletons, male and female, were clearly physically close when they died: she on a bed, he on the floor. Archaeology offers other hints. She seems to have been richer (or at least was carrying gold); they spent their last hours together (debris trapped them in the room); those hours were terrible (he, his injuries show, died first). Archaeology offers one final clue: their ages. She was in her 30s or 40s; he in his teens or early 20s. Perhaps they were lovers, or mother and child, or total strangers. Even at the distance of 2,000 years you find yourself hoping she did not watch her own son die. Welcome to Pompeii. This is the ancient city both as you have seen it before—graffiti, frescoes, tiles, toilets and some highly enviable terrazzo—and as you have never seen it before. The largest dig in 70 years is under way: 3,200 square metres have been uncovered and innumerable tonnes of soil, rubble and pumice have been moved. In them are, so far, three houses, a bathhouse, a fresco that looks so like a pizza that archaeologists call it the 'not-pizza' fresco, five human skeletons and, this being Pompeii, lots of phalluses. The dig feels faintly surprising, less for what is being found (little has been able to surprise archaeologists since Pompeii's infamous god-having-sex-with-a-goat statue was unearthed in 1752) than that there is anything left to be found at all. Pompeii feels so familiar: it has appeared in films ('POMPEII' in 2014) and fiction (Robert Harris's 'POMPEII') and non-fiction (Mary Beard's —guess what—'POMPEII'). In the three-odd centuries since excavations began, it has been used—and, critics say, abused—by almost every generation. It has been used as a stone quarry (nice stones) and a classical one (nice statues). It has been held up as a parable of sexual liberty (its frescoes); sexual immorality (that goat) and debauchery (ditto). It has been seen as a paradigm of civilisation (its plumbing) and barbarism (its slavery). Every generation has offered a reaction: Christians tutted at it; Mussolini had dinner in it; Professor Beard metaphorically winked at it. It is often called a 'lost city' but few cities have had such exposure per square metre. Its art is found on fridge magnets and its mosaics made into doormats. The city has been recast as a souvenir. So much of Pompeii is known that it is easy to forget how much is not known: one-third of Pompeii is still unexcavated. That is obvious once you look closely. Walk through the popular bits of Pompeii—past the theatre, amphitheatre and brothel—and keep going and you will find yourself in quieter streets with fewer people and more pigeons. There are shopfronts here too, but their windows open onto a wall of earth: nothing seems to be behind them. These are the undug streets. But, after an injection of EU cash, archaeologists started digging in 2023. The dig is 'complicated', says Gabriel Zuchtriegel, the director of the site and author of 'The Buried City', a recent book. If you were to add an archaeologist to your novel, you would add Dr Zuchtriegel: German, handsome, he is fluent in three languages and mildly forbidding in all of them. (To cheer himself up, he reads the New Testament in ancient Greek.) Ask him his feelings on uncovering this stuff and he says 'nothing': you are just 'so concentrated'. The epigraph of his book comes from Herman Melville's diary: 'Pompeii like any other town. Same old humanity. All the same whether one be dead or alive.' To call this a 'dig' is to underplay the speed of it. Pompeii offers some of the finest archaeology in the world; it also offers some of the fastest. When Vesuvius erupted in 79AD, sending a cloud of ash 32km into the sky and surprising the locals—who not only did not know that Vesuvius was a volcano, but had no word for 'volcano'—what fell on Pompeii was not lava but pumice stones, so light that locals, as Pliny the Younger, a Roman writer watching from a nearby villa noted, 'tied pillows over their heads…for protection'. The stones kept falling at a rate of 15cm an hour. In three hours, they reached people's knees; in six, the height of a toddler. Most people fled—perhaps 90% escaped. Those who sheltered and stayed became, like the skeletons in the house, trapped. Their room, says Sophie Hay, an archaeologist, 'became their tomb'. Walls started to collapse under the weight (one killed the young man). Then the volcanic cloud collapsed and a wave of superheated pumice, gas and ash raced, at speeds of 100kph and temperatures of over 200°C, down the slope. In Pompeii, people suffocated. In Herculaneum, people's brains boiled. It is hard to imagine a more appalling end—or, for archaeologists, a better one. The grains of pumice beneath were so light and dry that they protected all they fell on; so easy to remove that archaeologists, says Dr Hay, call it 'Amazon packaging material'. You less excavate Pompeii than unbox it, brushing grey, frozen-foam crumbs of pumice from a fresco here and shovelling it out of a swimming pool there. In days columns start to emerge, inverse Excaliburs, from a slowly sinking lake of grey. The problem with Pompeii is not getting stuff out: it is keeping it upright once you have. The same pumice-pyroclastic one-two that caught bodies as if in freeze-frame—this one clawing at a throat, or that little boy writhing—caught buildings in the same way. A shattered column or wall mid-fall can be wholly held up by pumice. Take it away and, like a game of giant Jenga, the whole thing might fall. A cat's cradle of scaffolding winds its way around the walls (see picture on previous page). Dr Zuchtriegel likens digging to performing 'a complicated operation'. It has been worth it, as what has been found is breathtaking. That is partly because, like so much else in Pompeii, it is untouched by time and partly because, like very little else in Pompeii, it is untouched by archaeologists. Pompeii's relics have suffered as much from enthusiasts as eruptions. The Bourbons plundered Pompeii (you can still see the holes, cut as if by giant mice, in the walls). Napoleon's sister, Caroline, planned, with Napoleonic efficiency, to uncover it all in three years. Everyone has stolen from it. The new excavations, by contrast, are pristine. A bathhouse has such perfect curved steps on its plunge pool you could imagine slipping into it today. A nearby wall is painted with such rich pigment you might find it on a Farrow & Ball colour chart ('Cataclysmic Ochre'). Many of the houses are mid-refurbishment. In one, roof tiles sit stacked, ready, on the floor; a builder's plaster-splashed bucket waits by a wall. Archaeologists play a game—a Roman Rightmove—of which house is nicest: the not-pizza-fresco one? The baths one? It is a bit of fun. But there is a ghoulish guiltiness to ogling Pompeii. Posterity accuses the Bourbons of 'collector syndrome'—the urge to acquire antiquity. But, Dr Zuchtriegel suggests, tourists are guilty of it too, acquiring experiences as greedily as Bourbons snatched artefacts. Millions visit each year, sweating across its forum, smirking in the brothel where the audio guide tells you about 'la vie sexuelle de Pompéi' in nine languages. Dr Zuchtriegel has limited the daily number of visits to 20,000, down from 36,000. He would prefer people not to tick off lists but to look at one thing, carefully. Which thing? He shows a favourite: in a small house there are little charcoal drawings of some gladiators. When they first uncovered this last year, they thought it might have been a stylised adult's drawing. Then they dug further and found that the artist had, in their way, autographed it, drawing round their own hand in charcoal. To judge from the size of the hand, the artist must have been six or seven. When they see it, everyone does the same thing, Dr Zuchtriegel says: they stretch out their own hand to hold it over where the Pompeiian child put theirs. Same old humanity, whether one be dead or alive. Photographs: Danilo Scarpati
The Guardian
11 hours ago
- The Guardian
Can't pay, won't pay: impoverished streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy
With a trip to Florence booked, all I want is to rewatch Medici. The 2016 historical drama series tells of the rise of the powerful Florentine banking dynasty, and with it, the story of the Renaissance. Until recently, I could simply have gone to Netflix and found it there, alongside a wide array of award-winning and obscure titles. But when I Google the show in 2025, the Netflix link only takes me to a blank page. I don't see it on HBO Max, Disney+, Apple TV+, or any of the smaller streaming platforms. On Amazon Prime I am required to buy each of the three seasons or 24 episodes separately, whereupon they would be stored in a library subject to overnight deletion. Raised in the land of The Pirate Bay, the Swedish torrent index, I feel, for the first time in a decade, a nostalgia for the high seas of digital piracy. And I am not alone. The Guardian's journalism is independent. We will earn a commission if you buy something through an affiliate link. Learn more. For my teenage self in the 00s, torrenting was the norm. Need the new Coldplay album on your iPod? The Pirate Bay. The 1968 adaptation of Romeo and Juliet? The Pirate Bay. Whatever you needed was accessible with just a couple of clicks. But as smartphones proliferated, so did Spotify, the music streaming platform that is also headquartered in Sweden. The same Scandinavian country had become a hub of illegal torrenting and simultaneously conjured forth its solution. 'Spotify would never have seen the light of day without The Pirate Bay,' Per Sundin, the then managing director of Universal Music Sweden, reflected in 2011. But music torrenting died out as we all either listened with ads or paid for the subscription. And when Netflix launched in Sweden in late 2012, open talk of torrenting moving images also stopped. Most of the big shows and a great collection of award-winning films could all be found for just 79 SEK (£6) a month. Meanwhile, the three founders of The Pirate Bay were arrested and eventually jailed. Pirating faded into the history books as far as I was concerned. A decade and a half on from the Pirate Bay trial, the winds have begun to shift. On an unusually warm summer's day, I sit with fellow film critics by the old city harbour, once a haven for merchants and, rumour has it, smugglers. Cold bigstrongs in hand (that's what they call pints up here), they start venting about the 'enshittification' of streaming – enshittification being the process by which platforms degrade their services and ultimately die in the pursuit of profit. Netflix now costs upwards of 199 SEK (£15), and you need more and more subscriptions to watch the same shows you used to find in one place. Most platforms now offer plans that, despite the fee, force advertisements on subscribers. Regional restrictions often compel users to use VPNs to access the full selection of available content. The average European household now spends close to €700 (£600) a year on three or more VOD subscriptions. People pay more and get less. A fellow film critic confides anonymously: 'I never stopped pirating, and my partner also does it if he doesn't find the precise edition he is looking for on DVD.' While some people never abandoned piracy, others admit they have recently returned – this time turning to unofficial streaming platforms. One commonly used app is legal but can, through community add-ons, channel illicit streams. 'Downloading is too difficult. I don't know where to start,' says one film viewer. 'The shady streams might bombard me with ads, but at least I don't have to worry about getting hacked or caught.' According to London‑based piracy monitoring and content‑protection firm MUSO, unlicensed streaming is the predominant source of TV and film piracy, accounting for 96% in 2023. Piracy reached a low in 2020, with 130bn website visits. But by 2024 that number had risen to 216bn. In Sweden, 25% of people surveyed reported pirating in 2024, a trend mostly driven by those aged 15 to 24. Piracy is back, just sailing under a different flag. 'Piracy is not a pricing issue,' Gabe Newell, the co-founder of Valve, the company behind the world's largest PC gaming platform, Steam, observed in 2011. 'It's a service issue.' Today, the crisis in streaming makes this clearer than ever. With titles scattered, prices on the rise, and bitrates throttled depending on your browser, it is little wonder some viewers are raising the jolly roger again. Studios carve out fiefdoms, build walls and levy tolls for those who wish to visit. The result is artificial scarcity in a digital world that promised abundance. Whether piracy today is rebellion or resignation is almost irrelevant; the sails are hoisted either way. As the streaming landscape fractures into feudal territories, more viewers are turning to the high seas. The Medici understood the value linked to access. A client could travel from Rome to London and still draw on their credit, thanks to a network built on trust and interoperability. If today's studios want to survive the storm, they may need to rediscover that truth.
