“Orlando” by Virginia Woolf, her 1928 novel about an Elizabethan boy who turns into a woman over several centuries has been, put it this way, one of the most-favored by fashion designers as a theme for some decades. In a preview at Dior, Maria Grazia Chiuri was explaining how the book is full of descriptions of clothes, and how it syncs with her interest in the changing shape of costume through the ages. Pinned on her board of research were photos of Woolf and her lover, Vita Sackville West, and theater scenographer Robert Wilson, who made the backdrop for a reading of Orlando by Isabelle Huppert in 1993.

But anyway, let’s put that aside and go straight to the clothes: some quite amazing, purportedly designed as a history trip, but actually just wearable, wantable and practical everyday out-in-the-street things.

That’s quite a thing to say when you’re ostensibly looking at Tudor doublets and knickerbockers, Elizabethan stomachers, ruffs, redingotes, medieval suits of armor and (pretend) royal ermine. But Chiuri dealt with all of this in a largely believable way from the first look: a quasi-antique men’s jacket with the internal tailoring basting on the outside with a black frilled blouse spilling from its neck, Bermuda-y knickers and a kind of spat-kneeboot.

That put a promising foot forward for more tailoring to come: raw-edged black velvet brocaded coats and capes worn with copious crisp white foulard shirts with dangling cuffs, and particularly, a near red hacking jacket and black taffeta shorts. The smart part amongst all this was the masculine-feminine detail: corsets, or rather parts of them, designed to zipper in or out of the front of jackets, coats, parkas. Chiuri demonstrated how they could pull in a waistline should you be in the mood, or leave it undone, or off, when not.