Under a female gaze at Paris haute couture

A few decades ago, around the time she unveiled her breakthrough work The Dinner Party and formulated her animating question "What if women ruled the world?", artist Judy Chicago made a maquette of an enormous sculpture she wanted to build.

Titled: The Female Divine, it would be a reclining corpulent nude, revelling in her own fleshy abundance. At the time, Chicago couldn't get anyone to fund the piece. "Who would want to see that?" was the general drift.

Approximately 40 years later, enter Dior. Last week at Paris Couture, the brand made Chicago's dream a reality. The fashion version of it, anyway.

Instead of a sculpture, the brand built a show space in the shape of Chicago's goddess: a 76m long, more than 24m wide and 15m high tent splayed in the gardens of the Rodin Museum, dwarfing the French sculptor's heroic marbles. Guests entered via a doorway cut into the tent's curving bottom, like the entry to the birth canal, and strolled inside to sit down in the belly of the woman.

"I have learnt," says Chicago, who is 80, in an interview the day before the Dior show, "that you never know what will happen if you live long enough and put art out into the world." Ideas, too.

That women could rule the world – or, at least, legislate much of it – no longer seems such a pipe dream in the era of Nancy Pelosi as speaker of the US House of Representatives; of Sanna Marin as Finland's prime minister; and Ursula von der Leyen as president of the European Commission.

Still, it was hard not to wonder: If women ruled the world, wouldn't they deserve clothes that redefined them entirely?

Of the fourth Women's March, which took place two days before the Dior show. And of Dior itself, its womenswear now designed by an actual woman, Maria Grazia Chiuri. (That sentence may sound ridiculous, but it is correct.)