Some fashion destinations are chosen for the backdrop. Others come with history. Come May 14, 2027, Jonathan Anderson will bring Dior’s Cruise 2028 collection to Shanghai, marking his first Dior Cruise presentation in Asia since taking the reins of the house. The announcement might be light on details for now, but the destination is anything but arbitrary. Shanghai has been woven in Dior’s story for nearly eight decades, from a Christian Dior sketch in 1948 to John Galliano’s spectacular Cruise show on the Bund in 2010. Seventeen years after Galliano brought the Cruise collection to Shanghai, Anderson will now return to the city with a new chapter of his own. And if his first Dior Cruise collection is anything to go by, the archive may well have a part to play. 

How Did Shanghai First Enter The Dior Archive?

The story begins with Christian Dior himself. In 1948, just two years after founding his maison, Christian Dior named a Haute Couture look “Shanghai” for his Spring/Summer collection, despite never having visited China. It was part of a wider fascination with the country that surfaced repeatedly in his work, from “Pékin” and “Chinoiseries” to “Nuit de Chine” and “Bleu de Chine”.

Shanghai was part of the Dior lexicon long before it became a stop on the international fashion calendar. That history was not lost on John Galliano either. In a 2015 conversation with Metropolitan Museum curator Andrew Bolton, Galliano acknowledged that his Dior designs frequently referenced those of the founder, adding that Christian Dior’s China-inspired looks had “served as a catalyst” and were woven into his work at the house as part of his creative storyline. 

What Happened When Dior First Came To Shanghai?

Fast-forward to May 2010, when John Galliano brought Dior’s Resort 2011 collection to the Bund for the house’s first runway show in Shanghai. A 150-metre Dior-grey tent stretched along the Huangpu River, with some 500 guests watching as a 120-person Dior team descended on the city for the occasion.

Yet the collection itself was decidedly not a lesson in chinoiserie. “I didn’t really want to do ‘China’ at all,” Galliano said at the time, partly because he had explored those references before and did not feel they were appropriate for the moment. Instead he looked to French New Wave cinema and its Sixties muses – Jean Seberg, Romy Schneider and Jeanne Moreau – alongside the French savoir-faire of the house, hoping to capture what he saw as a similar creative electricity between Paris then and Shanghai now. 

It is a distinction worth keeping in mind. Although Shanghai was the chosen backdrop, Galliano never treated it as a costume. Instead, he found a way for Dior’s own visual language to meet the city’s energy – a precedent that makes Anderson’s upcoming interpretation all the more intriguing.

But the 2010 runway was only part of Dior’s wider Shanghai takeover, with the house bringing its Savoir-Faire exhibition to the reopening of the Peter Marino-designed Plaza 66 boutique and premiering David Lynch’s Lady Blue Shanghai, starring Marion Cotillard. For two days, Dior turned Shanghai into its own world of glamour, making the city not merely the backdrop, but the occasion itself.