CR blog spoke to designer friends about mood and intention in 2018. Maria Grazia Chiuri weighed in: ""My motto for 2018 is that of American artist Marilyn Minter: Resist. Because we should defend our ideas, stand our ground, and never back down. We should always be brave. All of the work that we have done to be brave enough to face reality and try to change it, the campaigning for equality and for equal rights and responsibilities, too, are part of a long-term project. Now is the time to resist and try to build something new and extraordinary."

Watching for the first time Chiuri's Dior Couture Fall 2017 video, I sense the mood of the designer's forward women's march in a collection honoring Dior's cosmopolitan, globetrotting roots. Gone are the Roger Vivier spindly heels, replaced by men's brogues and manly ankle boots.

'The Crown's' mood is everywhere in the Dior couture show: the sobriety, modest femininity and pared-down opulence. Yes, Chiuri was consumed by Dior's 70th anniversary and accompanying Musée des Arts Décoratifs exhibition, a visual feast that opened in July right after this show.

Yet, there is a distinctly feminist, #RESIST current running through this Dior couture collection. Will it declare itself again in Chiuri's fall 2018 ready-to-wear show? I hope so. After all, the female actors like Meryl Streep, Jessica Chastain and Emma Jones are promising to wear black dresses to the Golden Globes Awards next Sunday night to protest gender inequality and sexual harassment. The women have also said that they will not answer frivolous, Red Carpet fashion questions like "who are you wearing?" Like Chiuri's countless marching women, they will speak on topics related to the act of RESISTing.

Older women in America are not amused by the horror stories coming out of Hollywood and the entire #MeToo movement. A new sobriety is key because Betty Friedan's book 'The Feminine Mystique' was written in 1963, launching the second wave of American feminism. French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir's 'The Second Sex' was written in 1949. Most of us assumed that this absurd, irrational discussion about female inferiority would be settled by 2017, and yet Chiuri lists 'The Second Sex' on her December Vogue feminist reading list.

What we are clear about is exactly HOW LITTLE HAS CHANGED for American women -- much less than for women in the Scandinavian countries. America continues to rank about 90th in the world in electing women to political office. Granted, a serious, never-seen-before wave of women running for political office is in high gear from the local city council to the US House of Representatives.

Maria Grazia Chiuri feels deeply this zeitgeist moment of exasperation, disbelief that so little has changed for women worldwide, and a total comprehension of just how deeply entrenched male power -- especially white male power -- is in America and in many European countries. Of course, this is not an all or nothing argument. Many men have changed and/or evolved.

Claiming the mantle of female creativity as Dior's first woman designer, Chiuri can celebrate the advancement for her gender while understanding fully the changes that haven't come in the almost 70 years since Simone de Beauvoir wrote her philosophical blockbuster on perceived female inferiority.

Weeks after Anita Hill assumed leadership of Hollywood's new commission on sexual harassment and advancing equality in the workplace, 300 women launched today -- New Year's Day 2018 -- 'Time's Up'. Hill emerged in the national dialogue on sexual harassment, after infamously testifying against Clarence Thomas's supreme court confirmation hearings in 1991. Thomas had been Hill's boss at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and she claimed very boorish, tasteless and ongoing harassment of a sexual nature from now Supreme Court Justice Thomas.

The Time's Up movement includes top show business figures Shonda Rhimes, Ashley Judd, Eva Longoria, Reese Witherspoon, America Ferrera, Natalie Portman, Emma Stone, Kerry Washington, and Rashida Jones. It's Kerry Washington who played Anita Hill in the HBO 2016 film 'Confirmation' and all these women were among Hillary Clinton's top surrogates in the 2016 presidential election.

The Time's Up movement went public at timesupnow.com on Monday with an open letter 'Dear Sisters' signed by hundreds of women in show business, pledging their full support to working-class women. The letter also ran as a full-page ad in The New York Times, and in La Opinion, a Spanish-language newspaper. The 'Dear Sisters' letter is in response to one sent to Hollywood women by Latina farmworkers of Alianza Nacional de Campesinas in advance of their Nov. 12 'The Take Back the Workplace' march in Los Angeles.

Time's Up has 1) a legal defense fund, backed now by $13 million in donations earmarked to help less privileged women protect themselves from sexual misconduct and threats of job loss among janitors, nurses and workers at farms, factories, restaurants and hotels. Articles like the New York Times' How Tough Is It to Change a Culture of Harassment? Ask Women at Ford astonished many professional women in and out of Hollywood.

2) Time's Up is committed to moving legislation to penalize companies that tolerate persistent harassment and use nondisclosure agreements to silence victims.

3) The group has already launched a drive to reach gender parity at studios and talent agencies.

4) And as promised, Time's Up requests that women walking the red carpet at the Golden Globes raise awareness by wearing black and speaking out on behalf of all women. It seems likely that many Hollywood women will honor Chiuri's own work in her first year at the helm of Dior by wearing her dresses. Any red carpet journalist who hasn't gotten the message that female actors won't be peddling luxury gowns at the Golden Globes will get a comprehensive and informed retort on feminism from the Time's Up crowd.

Notably, Chiuri's personal voyage into feminism only came to her five years ago, when she was about 48. Interviewed by The Daily Telegraph in November, she explained:

Maria Grazia Chiuri and Chimamanda Ngochi Adichie after the Dior Cruise 18 show.

“I came of age at a golden time in Italy. I was brought up to think a woman could do anything she wanted. That was pre Berlusconi. It was downhill for Italian women once he came into power. Total objectification. Honestly, I’m so happy my daughter is living in London. I just wish my son wasn’t living in Italy right now”.

Grazia’s late awakening, (courtesy of Raquele and Chimamanda Ngochi Adichie’s short book We Should All be Feminists, a title Chiuri emblazoned onto a collection of sell-out t shirts in her first Dior show) explains why she only took up the metaphorical placards once she’d arrived at Dior, in late 2016. “For all those years I worked at Fendi, it never occurred to me to be vocal. It was such an amazing company - and entirely run by the five Fendi sisters. There didn’t seem any need to shout about feminism. I guess I had got very complacent, like a lot of my generation.”

Lisa Armstrong, fashion director for The Daily Telegraph, writes that some critics are irked that feminism has become such a hot seller for Dior.

In the fifteen months since her arrival, sales of Dior’s feminist and feminine accessories – Guevara-esque berets, bandolier cross- body bags that look like the kind of thing an upmarket revolutionary would sling across her body and all that luxuriously soft, 70s –in- spirit, eye wateringly expensive denim – have kept Dior at the forefront of luxury shoppers’ minds.

As for those who contend that fashion should be above politics, from Chiuri's perspective "that’s like saying fashion should be above life. Since I’ve been researching Christian Dior, I’ve learned that understanding this house isn’t just about learning how he cut. It’s discovering how he thought. He was a gallerist before he worked in fashion. He had avant-garde tastes and a lot of views that for the times were quite progressive. Plus, I’ve realised that fashion is a very powerful medium.”

In 2017, Forbes ranked christian Dior as the most valuable apparel company in the world, with $43.6 billion in sales -- larger than Nike and Inditex, which owns Zara.

As the groundswell of American feminism rises higher than we ever thought possible in Trumplandia, we follow Chiuri's ever move. After starting 2018 determined to RESIST, as she challenges us on CR blog, a sober defiance is on the march, perhaps followed this time by a refusal to retreat. After all, our daughters and granddaughters cannot take birth control for granted in Trump's America. His minions have put us on notice. ~ Anne

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