Eight months after Raf Simons left Christian Dior in a move that rattled the fashion industry, the house has revealed his replacement. This morning, news has broken that Valentino’s former joint creative director, Maria Grazia Chiuri, has been appointed as Dior’s new artistic director.

Speaking in an interview with the BoF, Dior chief exec Sidney Toledano revealed that the first time he met her, he “knew that she was the one,” citing her “global experience,” “big intuition” and pragmatism. 

Chiuri, whose departure from Valentino was announced yesterday, has become the seventh – and crucially, first female – couturier in the house’s 69-year history. For Toledano, that was part of her appeal – “Because she’s a woman and she has a different perspective on what she is going to do and it played an important part,” he said. “I was looking for somebody that was deeply understanding the needs of a woman of today and tomorrow globally.”

“To dress a woman is more important than ever today. The evolution of women is a special evolution and her vision and how she wants to transform it is really interesting.” he continued.

Up until now, Chiuri has been working at Valentino, where she joined as an accessory designer before being promoted to joint creative director shortly after the retirement of the house’s founder, Valentino Garavani, in 2007. Prior to that, she was working at Fendi.

While her predecessor, Simons, straddled jobs at Dior and his own eponymous label, it is understood that Chiuri will be devoting herself entirely to her new job where she will be responsible for women’s haute couture, ready-to-wear and accessory collections. She will present her inaugural (SS17 ready-to-wear) collection for the house at Paris Fashion Week on September 30th.