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Even Anna Wintour can only be in one place at a time. And rather than Paris, where Jonathan Anderson made his Dior debut on Friday, the most powerful person in fashion was in Venice for the Bezos/Sánchez wedding shortly after relinquishing her role as editor-in-chief at American Vogue.
And unlike the wedding of the year, Anderson’s show proved to be sweet relief for anyone wanting to flex a cooler, chicer muscle. Perched on wooden cubes within the Cour du Dôme Des Invalides sat plenty of VIP clout: Daniel Craig, Donatella Versace and Roger Federer. Most of the Arnault family, who own Dior and routinely joust with Jeff Bezos over who has more money, were present. Even Rihanna, pregnant in a Dior pastel waistcoat, was relatively punctual.
Anderson is known for his sharp eye and crafty, mercurial taste – few people have shaped the red carpet and ultimately the high street into the hype machine it is today. But Dior is a different challenge. As the first creative director of menswear and womenswear since Christian Dior himself, the designer needs to revamp LVMH’s second biggest brand, with estimated revenues far greater than his former label, Loewe.
“I can’t stand here and say I’m not nervous, that it is not petrifying”, he said backstage before the show, wearing his trademark Levi’s and a plaid Dior shirt. “Dior is on billboards. It’s on Rihanna. It’s transcendent. But this is the starting point – I’ve been here four months, and the first five shows will show different aspects. Some will contradict; others will be completely radical.”
Some designers get critical acclaim; others sell a lot of clothes – a rare few have a talent to do both, but that’s the hope with Anderson. Because of tariff wars, and a decline in the luxury market, LVMH shares have halved from their 2023 peak. “Delphine [Arnault] and I, we talked about changing the quality, about upping the game,” Anderson said.
Opening the show was a bar jacket designed in Donegal tweed, from Ireland. More interested in how a look is put together than the clothes themselves, he styled it with a pair of thick cream cargo shorts cut from 15 metres of fabric and layered up like a Viennetta. Knitted vests were a through line, as were ties and neck ruffles, and plenty of colour – greens and pinks and blues. Dior, he says, is a house of colour, in part because it offsets the “house grey” that featured on billboards, Dior clothes labels he redesigned and the Parisian sky.
A puffer gilet was circularly cut and placed over a formal shirt, while summer coats and capes came knitted or in pleated bright colours. One was even based on an original Dior shape, “that would have cost the equivalent of a Ferrari”, except here it was styled with trainers. There were even jeans – skinny and baggy, in indigo and green. The look was preppy and eccentric, with shades of Loewe, JW Anderson and even in the puffers, Uniqlo, among the classic Dior shapes.
On Anderson’s original moodboard were Warholian images of Basquiat and the socialite Lee Radziwill, alongside classic Dior dresses, such as the Delft and Cigale dresses. The idea was to take each look into the present, “to recontextualise it”. He even took his predecessor Maria Grazia Chiuri’s book bag totes and put a “new skin” on them, in the form of Dracula and Les Liaisons Dangereuses. It’s these hyperspecific references that give Anderson’s work a pleasing temporality, and will no doubt sell well – here at Dior, and whatever high street shop will no doubt copy him.
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Anderson is the latest big name to arrive at an established brand. “I’m not the only person going into a big house at the moment, but we need to let the dust settle,” he said, adding that he didn’t “want to chop it all down. It’s just a continuation.”
A great believer in the Jim Jarmusch approach to art – steal, adapt, borrow – he said: “Ownership in fashion is devastating. Copy [in design] is what you do. Because there will always be someone after you.”
