The fog drifted in over the manicured lawns of the Villa Albani Torlonia in Rome just as the Dior cruise show began, lending what was already a somewhat surreal moment an extra-otherworldly air.

All the female guests wore white, even Natalie Portman and Rosamund Pike; the men, black. As they entered the verdant inner courtyard of the private manse, with its collection of Greco-Roman antiquities, they walked past dancers posed like moving statuary. When the first models appeared, to the strains of a live orchestra, light rain began to fall.

Along with the mist, it made the clothes, almost all ivory and often so light as to be practically transparent, seem ghostly (even for someone like me, watching through the computer screen): an ethereal stew of references in lace, silk and velvet — with the occasional tailcoat — to different periods in history and imagination.

In a video call before the show, the designer, Maria Grazia Chiuri, said she had been after what she called “beautiful confusion,” the phrase Ennio Flaiano originally suggested as a title for Fellini’s “8½.” It was an apt description, not just of the collection itself, which seemed made for phantoms slipping from one era into the next, but also of the question mark surrounding her own situation.

Ms. Chiuri had nominally brought Dior back to her home city to celebrate the romantic spirits that formed her (and helped shape fashion), from La Cinecittà to the director Pier Paolo Pasolini and Mimì Pecci-Blunt, an early 20th-century patroness of the arts who built a private theater Ms. Chuiri recently restored. But she also brought herself and her audience full circle, back to the place she began.