FASHION

Bella Hadid Frees the Nipple at Dior’s Fairytale ‘Bal Masqué’

A fitting statement for Maria Grazia Chiuri’s first couture celebration.


Maria Grazia Chiuri unveiled her first couture collection for Christian Dior on the first day of the Spring 2017 couture week in Paris on Monday. The collection itself debuted to much fanfare — Kirsten Dunst, A$AP Rocky, Diane Kruger, and more descended on the Musée Rodin, where the show was staged, to take it all in — but the celebrations didn’t end with the runway itself. After the show — and after a quick costume change — models like Bella Hadid and Kendall Jenner waltzed back over to the museum for the afterparty, a glamorous masked ball also attended by Soko and Sai Bennett. Masks in hand and swathed in sheer, daring Dior designs from Chiuri’s first collection, Spring 2017 ready-to-wear, the models channeled their inner Cinderella, with an edgy twist. Good thing Chiuri’s designs lend themselves well to fairytales.

Bella Hadid in Dior at the Christian Dior Haute Couture Spring Summer 2017 Bal Masqué during Paris Fashion Week in Paris, France, January 2017.

Getty Images for Dior

Who: Bella Hadid.

When: Monday, January 23.

Where: The masked ball celebrating Maria Grazia Chiuri’s first couture collection for Christian Dior, the Spring 2017 show, at the Musée Rodin in Paris, France.

What: A sheer Dior gown by Maria Grazia Chiuri with high-waisted “J’Adior” briefs and, naturally, a black mask. This is a bal masqué, after all.

Why: Hadid, the current face of Dior Beauty (a line previously represented by Kate Moss, Jennifer Lawrence, and Sasha Luss), wears the brand best. For Chiuri’s Spring 2017 collection, the designer showed graphic tees with slogans drawn from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie — “We Should All Be Feminists” — and a play on the (Red) campaign — “Dio(R)evolution.” As the first woman artistic director of Dior, Chiuri set the tone with a bold statement, both explicitly, in those t-shirts, and implicitly, with a dreamy, romantic collection that was designed for women, by a woman. So it seems fitting that her designs are now deployed for a different kind of movement empowering women: #FreetheNipple.

When she gets home from a long day of work, Bella Hadid just loves to play Jenga and snorkel in the bath: