Dior, Vatican Library Unveil ‘En Route’ Exhibition, Merging Fashion and Travels as 2025 Jubilee Kicks Off

Luisa Zargani
·6 min read

ROME — As the 2025 Jubilee celebrations kick off, scholarly and secular perspectives are meeting at the Vatican Apostolic Library, which on Thursday evening unveiled the exhibition “En route,” realized in collaboration with Dior and centered on the theme of travel — clearly a current topic given the millions of pilgrims expected to arrive in Rome during the year.

While Maria Grazia Chiuri, creative director of women’s collections for Dior, has worked with many artists over the years, this was her first personal exhibition, and for it she partnered with her longstanding collaborator and friend Karishma Swali and the artisans of the Chanakya School of Craft.

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They conceived a site-specific installation reflecting on the connection between fashion and travel, “starting with the stories of six late 19th-century female travelers, who defied the cultural stereotypes of the Victorian era, and highlighting how they needed to change their clothing to liberate the body, as they traveled the world by bicycle,” Chiuri said during a preview.

The entrance of the “En Route” exhibition.
The entrance of the “En Route” exhibition.

The installation was staged in the library of the Vatican, housing one of the oldest collections of books, maps and manuscripts in the world. “Knowledge and creativity are for me completely intertwined and I am both honored and humbled to be able to imagine a project in such a significant location for our global culture and education,” she said.

Chiuri highlighted that these women traveled on bicycles that weighed almost 200 pounds, so “the first thing they got rid of was the corset.” This led Chiuri and Swali to realize how the evolution of clothes can be “traced on maps, and we started creating paper patterns, tracing their journeys and superimposed embroideries and fabrics to describe those locations in a way that was not geographic but through our fashion language,” the designer said.

Chiuri revealed she and Swali worked on the project for about a year-and-a-half and that it involved a lot of research. “Surely this here is not a world that is immediately connected with the world of fashion, given the way fashion is perceived, but actually the two share the process of research.”

The designer said that “we discovered that women in England and in America were the first to create globes of the world, but without direct knowledge, they were reproduced through their imagination.”

The women in the Chanakya School who were asked to create the globes to be exhibited at the Vatican and who were tied to a life at home, worked in a similar way, explained Swali. She cited an ancient Indian philosophy whereby “the inner universe is the manifestation of the outer universe, and the idea is that we create our own universe,” so that these women’s homes and the nature surrounding them appear embroidered on the globes. These were made on a bamboo base, layered with organic cotton, yuta stitches and threads of silk, cotton and yuta, she said.

“Fashion is transient, it’s done and then we are on to the next, so it’s a continuous travel, and the paper patterns are similar to the maps,” Chiuri observed.

A map at the end of the room also stood pride of place showing a famous Simone de Beauvoir sentence, “Femininity is a trap.”

Chiuri admitted she was worried about taking on this initiative. “In the end, it was an opportunity for our own beautiful voyage, one of discovery, and with so many people working with us with so much enthusiasm. And it was a very personal project. It was interesting to express our work through a different language. It gave us time to pause and reflect on our work in a different way, with a different purpose from the commercial one. Only an exhibition would allow us to do it, and here it was only about pleasure.”

Two other artists were invited to participate in the exhibition, which will be open to the public from Feb. 15 to Dec. 20: popular Italian singer and composer Lorenzo Jovanotti Cherubini, a longtime friend of Chiuri’s and a globetrotter, showing his drawings, his diaries and souvenirs and introducing a dedicated soundtrack, and illustrator and graphic artist of Icelandic origin Kristjana S Williams.

A work by Kristjana S Williams in the “En Route” exhibition.

She reimagined the journeys of diplomat and scholar Cesare Poma, who died in 1932, whose collection of an archive of about 1,200 newspapers from remote locations and languages of all five continents was recently discovered.

Don Giacomo Cardinali, one of the curators of the exhibition, said the decision to choose such different artists was to “find a meeting point between the secular and the world we live in. The Vatican walls are high and we don’t want to be self-referential.”

To wit, at the preview, art and fashion critic Maria Luisa Frisa praised the idea of offering  three different points of view and Chiuri’s hand at staging her first exhibition. “Also, because it’s housed not in an art gallery but in a library makes perfect sense, since it’s where different languages coexist, writing, illustrations, photographs, fashion treaties and more.”

Poma’s collection also shed light on the periodical “En Route,” which two French journalists, Lucien Leroy and Henri Papillaud, published during their global travels between 1895 and 1897. The publication aimed to finance their journey and share the stories of the places they visited. Thanks to the support of Dior and the Galateri di Genola and the Suniglia family, the Poma.Periodici collection will be catalogued, digitized and made accessible for free online through the institution’s platforms.

After the preview visit, attended also by Delphine Arnault, chairman and chief executive officer of Dior, the French house held a dinner for about 90 guests. Artist Mona Oren, who has worked with Chiuri before and created her own versions of the Lady Dior handbag, created a beautiful wax centerpiece running the length of a single table. Oren recreated a series of antique books and flowers on a tablecloth — entirely in wax — lit up by LED lights.

“I have worked with wax since I was a student, it’s my signature, and while this looks very delicate and fragile, it’s actually not, it’s meant to last,” Oren said of the modular installation, where each book and each flower is separate. The whole process took about three months and Oren said she employed about 441 pounds of wax.

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