Maria Grazia Chiuri’s Dior spring 2025 collection is hot. While FKA twigs’s “Eusexua” and Charli xcx and Billie Eilish’s “Guess,” resounded through a tent in the garden of Musée Rodin on September 24, there was no mistaking the designer’s pivot from fall’s prim, A-line ’60s silhouettes to curve-hugging performance fabrics and daring cutouts. (The latter song choice also served as a clever callback to Chiuri’s signature see-through tulle dresses, which put underwear colors on full display.)

Chirui’s MO is female empowerment, so for her, revealing clothes are not about provocation, but about giving women freedom of movement. The curve-hugging pieces exemplified her frame of mind for this collection; the show notes stated that the creative director “aims to bring fashion back to its origins and emphasize the relationship connecting the body and what dresses it.”

Her starting point was Diana of Versailles, an ancient Roman statue in the Louvre depicting an Amazonian warrior striding confidently in a hiked-up toga with a quiver of arrows over her shoulder, plus Christian Dior’s fall 1951 Amazone dress. She was also thinking about the Paris Olympics and the maison’s love of sport, dating to the founder’s embrace of functional riding jackets and bathing suits and Marc Bohan’s introduction of a Dior Sport line in 1962.

Chiuri invited Sofia Ginevra Gianní—an Italian performance artist and competitive archer known as SAGG Napoli whose work explores why bodycon aesthetics are looked down upon—to transform the runway into a 70-meter metal-and-glass archery shooting range from which she fired arrows as the models walked. As she pulled back her bowstring in a one-shoulder top and paneled mini skirt that highlighted her athletic physique, she looked every bit the emblem of courageous femininity that the Diana statue embodies—and so did the models.

The color palette for spring was mainly monochrome, with the graphic Miss Dior logo elongated to the extreme to create sporty stripes that danced across cropped moto and track jackets. Even Dior’s nipped-waist suiting took on a sporty élan, paired with airy basketball pants. Bathing suits in black and metallics were a bull’s eye. Fashioned asymmetrically with single straps or cutouts at the hips, they served as layering pieces under sheer dresses, running skirts, and mesh jersey maxi dresses, and were also worn solo with over-the-knee boxing boots.