Life After Fashion

When one chapter ends, it always opens onto a blank page. For Maria Grazia Chiuri, this next page will be written in the red-velvet-draped setting of this Italian-style theater, originally built by Countess Anna Laetitia Pecci-Blunt — affectionately known as Mimi — an impassioned and flamboyant arts patron. A whimsical figure who always fascinated Chiuri, who, as a child, dreamed of entering the palace next door, also belonging to the Pecci family. Chiuri also sees this new adventure not as fate, but perhaps as a sign from above: “The Pecci family’s coat of arms was a comet, which gave the theater its name,” she told Le Monde. “And as we know, Mr. Dior made a star his lucky charm and emblem.”

In her hometown of Rome, Chiuri and her daughter will bring the theater back to life with a program of plays, readings, recitals, and performances. But is she truly leaving her past behind? The stage, the lights, tragedy, comedy, makeup, costumes, audience — theater has something of fashion, and vice versa.

This naturally raises the question of life after fashion — a world like no other, sometimes feeding on hubris, where designers are exalted by brands as gods (at least as long as collections sell), only to be quickly dethroned when their creativity no longer flies off the shelves.