The tenure of Dior’s first female designer, Maria Grazia Chiuri, formally came to an end on Thursday with an announcement that she was leaving the brand after nine years. It had been rumored for months, so it surprised no one. Really it had ended two days before in Rome, with a cruise show. One that encapsulated all she had brought to the house. Even if she didn’t admit it, she clearly had designed it that way.

It’s one way to have the last word.

Indeed, the fog that drifted in over the manicured lawns of the Villa Albani Torlonia in Rome just as the show began lent what was already a surreal moment an extra-otherworldly air.

Ms. Chiuri had requested that all of the female guests wear 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, Ms. Chiuri said she had been after what she called “beautiful confusion,” the phrase the screenwriter 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 what was then a question mark surrounding her own position.