The collection notes for Jonathan Anderson’s first Cruise show for Dior, held at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) yesterday evening (13 May 2026), were a fantasy film script, with the designer himself – who as a teenager had travelled from Ireland to the United States to become an actor, before shifting course to fashion – as the star. In its pages, Jonathan Anderson (the character) narrates the collection’s inspirations as the action lines describe a runway show that is yet to happen. ‘A model appears on the runway in a buttercup-yellow dress,’ they begin, with everything from music to scenography accounted for – a meta-nod, perhaps, to the way we now consume runway shows through the mediation of a screen.
But the script also set the stage for a Cruise collection that was about the perennial allure of Hollywood, and deeply rooted in the Parisian house’s history and lore. Christian Dior would outfit a coterie of cinema’s leading ladies – from Marlene Dietrich and Marilyn Monroe to Ingrid Bergman, Elizabeth Taylor and Grace Kelly – both on and off the screen, receiving an Oscar nomination in 1955 for his work on Terminal Station (Anderson has also dabbled in film-costuming; while at Loewe, he was costume designer for Luca Guadagnino’s Queer and Challengers).
Lights, camera, action: Dior heads to Hollywood for Cruise 2027
‘I was about to find a less unknown world: California,’ Christian Dior wrote of his first trip to the area in 1947. ‘Was it not the earthly paradise of which all Americans and so many Europeans dreamed? A year-round climate, an ever-shining sun, a bounty of fruit trees and flowers, large beaches lapped by the Pacific waves. In short, a super-Riviera.’
It was in this spirit of escapism that Anderson approached the collection, which found inspiration in both the Californian landscape – the state’s poppy became a recurring motif, appearing as rosettes of gathered fabric on dropped-waist gowns – and the gleaming sound stages of golden-age Hollywood. ‘Christian Dior understood how important the idea of “the dream” was for people after the war, as a form of escapism,’ Anderson says in the script. ‘He explored this in couture, his Surrealist friends were obsessed with dreams and, of course, Hollywood is “The Dream Factory”. It was all part of the same cross-cultural shift.’
Speaking that morning at a preview in the showspace, which saw the exterior of LACMA (where the new David Geffen Galleries have recently opened) dotted with vintage Cadillac cars, Anderson elucidated that this was a collection about finding joy in clothing. ‘We started with this idea of dressing up, dressing up in daytime, dressing up in evening – we just wanted a collection that is a bit fun,’ he said. Feathered headpieces, made by milliner Philip Treacy, recreated from an original design for Isabella Blow, read ‘Dior’ or slogans like ‘Buzz’ and ‘Star’, while bias-cut gowns had an insouciant glamour. Swathes of sequins, hyper-real floral adornment, and flashes of red also featured – the last a reference to Monsieur Dior, ‘who always put a red dress part way through his collections, simply to wake people up’.
But there was also a nod to Hollywood’s seedier side: Anderson said another inspiration had been Scotty Bowers’ Full Service: My Adventures in Hollywood and the Secret Sex Lives of the Stars, a gossipy tell-all that recounts the former gas attendant and bartender’s double-life arranging sexual liaisons for the town‘s biggest stars. ‘He was sleeping with most of Hollywood,’ said Anderson. ‘I thought that was an interesting starting point for a collection, this idea of action, when something is thrown into the camera lens.’
The collection featured menswear, the first time that the Dior man and woman have walked the same runway (Anderson is the only creative director of the house to have designed across genders). The menswear collection, which saw new riffs on nipped-waist Bar Jacket – including one in metallic tweed, shrunken in proportion as in Anderson’s previous collections for the house – also featured a collaboration with Ed Ruscha, seeing graphic slogans typography appearing across shirts. ‘I had wanted to do something with him for years, but he had said no. So that was my mission,’ Anderson said. ‘He took the canvas of the shirt and did what he wanted to do with it.’
The same could be said of the wider collection, in which Anderson seemed to revel in the freedom of showing a collection away from Dior’s home city of Paris. ‘It’s a moment to lean in,’ he said. ‘It’s my first time doing a resort show – you are going somewhere, and it’s fine to be a bit ironic – you can lean into the cliches, the nuances. You can have fun with it.’
