At the heart of the latest Dior cruise 2025 show shined the figure of Mary Stuart. The Queen of Scotland’s tragic life gives her a unique place in history as a singular woman who forged her destiny through art. By Boris Bergmann.
Observing portraits of Mary, Queen of Scots – likenesses inherited from bas-reliefs, always in profile as was the custom for monarchs of yesteryear – her aura enchants: red locks seem to blossom into fine curls, a gentle gaze turns to a distant horizon, a calm bearing appears imperturbable, decorum is underscored by wonderfully conceived garments. Fascinated by this extraordinary woman, Maria Grazia Chiuri made her a key inspiration for the Dior cruise 2025 show, which was held in Scotland, where Mary Stuart remains the country’s most famous sovereign.
She is history’s sublime ellipsis. As such, she attains the mythological heights of Shakespearean characters and the heroines of antiquity. Her life was marked by exile, defiance and silence. But, as if observed through an inverted mirror, hers is also a story of power, risk-taking, intelligence, passion and resilience. In many dazzling ways.
Crowned Queen of Scotland just six days after her birth, she was sent by her mother to France, where she was raised far from her native moorlands. She married François II and became Queen of France, forging an eternal – unbreakable – bond between the two countries. But her husband died suddenly, and her short-lived reign lasted only a few months. She decided to return to Scotland. A devout Catholic, she was rejected by her own predominantly Protestant people, who condemned her faith. Caught in a merciless power struggle, she endured abuse at the hands of her courtiers and eventually was arrested and imprisoned. Mary escaped and tried to reclaim her throne with the help of her cousin, Elizabeth I, Queen of England. But her ally betrayed her and confined her in turn, as Mary Stuart was also a legitimate heir to the English throne, and therefore presented a threat. She spent 18 years in captivity before being brutally executed.
This sombre fate prompted the greatest poets, composers and artists to celebrate her and dramatize her fatal misfortune. From Honoré de Balzac and Madame de Lafayette to Stefan Zweig, Robert Schumann and Friedrich Schiller, books, symphonies, plays and paintings extol her legend.
Maria Grazia Chiuri’s tribute is in a class of its own. Inspired by Clare Hunter’s book Embroidering Her Truth: Mary, Queen of Scots and the Language of Power*(see inset), the Creative Director for Dior women’s collections reveals another dimension of her personality. Most often, she is portrayed as a victim of destiny, subject to the conspiracies of her enemies, and men in particular. But during her long years of solitude, Mary Stuart developed a coded language that enabled her to communicate, to subtly evade surveillance and to “say”, to write, in her own way, what she was thinking in spite of everything. She used embroidery, which she mastered to perfection, as a means of transmission, to assert her resilience and her vision. She transformed that pastime, which is sometimes considered merely “domestic”, into a prodigious means of making herself heard. Embroidery was her royal voice; the garment, the mouthpiece for her emancipation. In that way, Mary Stuart escaped her sad plight and the silence to which she was tragically doomed. In so doing, she magnificently freed herself from the desolation imposed on her by men.
*Embroidering Her Truth: Mary, Queen of Scots and the Language of Power, Clare Hunter, Sceptre, 2022.
In Embroidering Her Truth: Mary, Queen of Scots and the Language of Power, the brilliant feminist historian Clare Hunter shows how, for Mary Stuart, embroidery became a language unto itself, a “textual textile”, a (secret) means of self-expression, of reclaiming control of her voice and telling her story, of leaving a trace of her absence in the margins of history. A testimony to the virtuoso grace of the hand, like a resilient testament to her terrible fate. By studying and exploring numerous archives, Clare Hunter describes the feminine countervailing that emerges from a savoir-faire transformed into a hallowed code.
