"Of course I am feminist," exclaims Maria Grazia Chiuri. “I grew up with women; my mother, my grandmother, very strong women, determined to make what they want in their life.” The artistic director at Christian Dior and I are sitting, not quite boots up on the furniture, but certainly curled up comfortably together, on a huge dove-grey sofa in a dove-grey salon within Dior’s stately Paris headquarters. I’d been perched on the edge of my seat in a hushed and rather chilly room until Chiuri strode in and raised the temperature with the warmth of her native Rome.

Chiuri’s eyes, ringed with black kohl, flash fire beneath white-blond peroxide hair, which today she wears scraped back. This 54-year-old is dressed in jeans and cowboy boots, and she flings herself down next to me. “I’m wearing the baggy-fit jeans today because I want to be re-lax-ed,” she says, rolling out each vowel so they seem to stretch all the way back to the banks of the Tiber.