Jonathan Anderson reimagines the tropes of Dior in a pointy, modern method for his debut womenswear assortment

At Loewe, Jonathan Anderson was as a lot a cultural curator as he was a clothes designer. At Dior, the Parisian home the place he introduced his debut womenswear assortment this afternoon, he appears to be like to be forging an identical path. Getting into the purpose-built showspace, friends had been greeted by an inverted pyramid protruding from the ceiling – not not like modernist architect I.M. Pei’s audacious entranceway for the Louvre, only a brief stroll away throughout the Jardin de Tulleries – which a card left on every attendee’s seat credited to the Italian movie director Luca Guadagnino and manufacturing designer Stefano Baisi (Anderson labored with each on Queer because the 2024 film’s costume designer; right here, they had been liable for ‘scenography’).

Jonathan Anderson’s first Dior womenswear assortment recodes the archive

Because the present started, the pyramid reworked right into a display screen for a specifically commissioned movie by British director Adam Curtis, greatest identified for his documentaries on individualism, energy, and the collapse of Twentieth-century ideologies, together with The Century of the Self, HyperNormalisation, and the current 2025 sequence Shifty, which examined late-Twentieth-century Britain underneath Conservative rule. Collaging archival footage in his atmospheric type, the brief movie gathered moments from the home’s near-eight-decade-long historical past, from clips of Christian Dior himself to collections from the designers on the home who adopted, together with John Galliano and Maria Grazia Chiuri, which flashed throughout the screens on the present’s begin (interspersed horror film scenes lent the sensation of tension which pulsates via Curtis’ work).

Beneath the pyramid’s level was the field friends had obtained the week prior, containing the present’s invitation – a plate of walnuts rendered fully in china, impressed by ceramic curiosities Anderson had found in the home’s archive. The phantasm was that the footage was rising, genie-like, from inside. ‘Daring to enter the home of Dior requires an empathy with its historical past, a willingness to decode its language, which is a part of the collective creativeness, and the resoluteness to place all of it in a field,’ mentioned Anderson by way of the gathering notes. ‘To not erase it, however to retailer it, wanting forward, coming again to bits, traces or whole silhouettes sometimes, like revisiting recollections.’

Anderson described his strategy as having an ‘empathy’ for the previous, although the movie’s finish – a shuddering rush of crackled footage earlier than the display screen turned a vivid, optic white – was symbolic of a clear slate, a shedding of the load of historical past. ‘Change is inevitable,’ he mentioned in sometimes direct method, presenting a group which took components of the archive and refracted them in his ingenious, idiosyncratic type, warping archival silhouettes into unusual and intriguing new proportions. Just like the Tailleur Bar go well with, which was shrunken and cropped in measurement, with a minuscule, abbreviated pleated skirt, whereas one other riff on the nipped-waist Bar jacket scooped up on the entrance, as if tied like a bow. Certainly, the bow was a recurring motif: a sequence of bow ties (worn with matching shirts and skirts) mirrored the subversion of formalwear in his menswear assortment for the home again in June, whereas hourglass clothes regarded like they’d been constructed from twists of cloth, tied on the finish with bows.

A way of theatricality got here in dramatic cornette-style headwear and face-covering trims of lace impressed by one other archival design. Micro-mini skirts had been constructed from frothy millefeuille layers of cloth, whereas the distinctive cantilevered waistline of Christian Dior’s 1952 La Cigale gown appeared to encourage the sculpted silhouette of trapeze clothes and double-breasted overcoats, which folded cleverly throughout their entrance. Extra grounded in actuality had been mini leather-based skirts (an abbreviated silhouette ran all through), slouchy suede purses with metallic ‘Dior’ {hardware} embedded of their straps, and pointed pumps adorned with the home’s signature ’C’ on one foot, and ‘D’ on the opposite. Anderson mentioned the gathering was constructed on this ‘rigidity’ – between fantasy and actuality, ‘dressing as a option to turn out to be a personality on the stage that’s life’.

Extra so than the menswear present earlier this 12 months, there was a readability to Anderson’s imaginative and prescient, which seeks to think about the tropes of Dior – particularly, an architectural building mixed with a temper of femininity and romance – in a pointy, modern type. That is solely turning into clearer as he builds out his universe: alongside the collaborations with Guadagnino and Curtis, his trio of muses – and new home ambassadors – Mia Goth, Greta Lee and Mikey Madison, had been in attendance at present and watched on from the entrance row. The bolder appears to be like on the runway is likely to be extra suited to their upcoming purple carpet appearances than the on a regular basis, however Anderson – a strong-willed designer who brims with confidence – is aware of that to construct a model requires bravery, imaginative and prescient and intuition, somewhat than security. It’s how he constructed Loewe right into a mega model – now, with Dior, and the eyes of the world watching, this unwavering strategy continues. Name it his New Look.