When a lockdown whim compelled Maria Grazia Chiuri to rearrange the furniture in her Paris apartment to make space for a pilates machine, she was responding to an instinct as old as time. “Sport is movement, sport is freedom. During lockdown, you would walk around your building just to get a sense of moving your body. That became our idea of freedom,” she said on a video call from Athens.

Her confinement reflections took her Dior Cruise show to a birthplace of sports, the Panathenaic Stadium, where Ancient Greeks worked up a sweat circa 330 BC. “I decided to show here because I’m interested in clothes as a way of giving freedom of movement,” Chiuri explained, echoing our post-pandemic desires. A reminder that restrictions are by no means history, ongoing travel complications meant that her show was largely attended by local press and clients, who were treated to a Greco-electro performance by the Greek-American singer Ioanna Gika.