Amid the pomp of the Parisian occasion that is the Dior Haute Couture show—its always incredible setting in the gardens of the Musée Rodin and the arrivals of the starry friends of the house and the Arnault family owners—it’s never so easy to clear your head and focus on what’s going on with the clothes. But under the roof of the leafy hothouse that Jonathan Anderson constructed, something softened and a little bit radical was going on between the knots and the pleats, the fluidity and the flower allusions.
The Bar suit is the toughest test for any creative director who enters the house: how to make it feel relevant for women living nearly 80 years after Christian Dior invented it. Anderson’s solution was effectively to melt it down, take away the hardness, and replace buttoned-up silhouettes with sensuously draped shapes.
One minute silver pleats were exploding outward from an asymmetric cocktail dress; the next, menswear checks had been bias cut and lightened up almost unrecognizably, executed with dressmaking rather than tailoring skills. A couple of trouser suits with gently waisted, frilled-edge black jackets were matched with white plissé silk trousers cut on the bias. Skirt suits had the elegant offhand drape of silk pajamas, casually tied in the middle, the corseting of old completely forgotten.
To create this new flow of things, Anderson continued in the footsteps of Maria Grazia Chiuri, who, during her tenure at Dior, collaborated with women artists or their estates. Anderson, fluent in the contemporary art world’s language, hooked up with Lynda Benglis, the American artist whose work blurring the boundaries between painting, sculpture, and textiles inspired his freedom in wrapping, tying, and metallic fan pleating. He’s had an ongoing relationship with the great radical feminist of the 1960s and ’70s since he was at Loewe, commissioning installations by her in 2023. (The importance of her work was put on the road to rightful recognition when Anderson’s friend, the gallerist and art consultant Andrew Bonacina, curated a retrospective at the Hepworth Wakefield museum in 2015.)
Benglis’s fascination with melting and manipulating materials into unconventional forms set off milliner Stephen Jones, who wrapped his metallic bonnets to echo and enhance the collection’s free-form vibe. Her practice and life story—she’s worked and lived in India and New Mexico for years—also had a profound effect. Anderson said he’d imagined her gardens in both parts of the world. Hence, the abundance of ferns, embroideries that he compared to cacti and eucalyptus, and shoes sprouting exuberantly conceptual flowers. Among the collection of clutches were purses covered in antique Indian chintz; others made of porcelain were decorated with water lilies.
Underlying it all was Anderson’s solution—or the beginnings of it—to cherish and honor the femininity and prettiness that have pervaded the house forever. The task is to make it attractive to customers who already love and spend at Dior, while also seeding a vision that can fan out beyond that to intrigue new ones. Haute couture is only for the world’s superwealthy, but Anderson knows how to communicate his Dior messages to a far broader constituency. A certain Dior-dressed wedding in New York a couple of days ago said exactly that too.
