At Christian Dior’s spring 2020 haute couture show in Paris today, attendees were ushered inside an enormous womblike chamber, with a curved mauve ceiling and soft lilac carpeting. The space was part of a 225-foot-long and 45-foot-high inflatable anthropomorphic sculpture, installed in the gardens of the Musée Rodin, by the pioneering American artist Judy Chicago. The 80-year-old first designed the structure, which represents a goddess figure with round feminine forms, in the late 1970s, though it was never realized in three dimensions. “I’m just glad I’ve lived long enough to see it,” she said before the show, dressed in a custom gold Dior suit, her hair dyed a regal purple.

The work, titled “The Female Divine,” served as the show venue and also contained 21 vividly colored, hand-appliquéd and embroidered velvet banners that lined the runway. Each was stitched with a query that related to the work’s driving proposition, which was written across a central banner: “What If Women Ruled the World?” The prompts ranged from the material — “Would Buildings Resemble Wombs?” — to the political and social: “Would God Be Female?” and “Would There Be Violence?” They were all questions that have been present in Chicago’s work since she began her practice in the 1960s. “I’m 40 years past ‘The Dinner Party’,” she says of her monumental 1974-79 work, a 48-foot-wide ceremonial banquet scene that celebrates 39 female icons, from the ancient poet Sappho to the artist Georgia O’Keeffe, and was produced in collaboration with a cohort of textile and ceramic artisans. “But the issue of changing attitudes toward women and imagining ‘the female divine’ is something that hasn’t happened yet, has it?”