The Tuileries Gardens in Paris, first constructed by Catherine de’ Medici in 1564 and later renovated in 1664 by Louis XIV in its formal French style, has long proved fertile ground for the wandering flâneur seeking artistic inspiration and enlightenment – from Édouard Manet to Oscar Wilde; Claude Debussy to Victor Hugo.
And this afternoon, Jonathan Anderson – the Northern Irish designer and creative director of Dior – was the latest creative mind to be seduced by the gardens’ charms, using the Tuileries to stage his A/W 2026 womenswear collection for the Parisian powerhouse. In bright spring sunshine, the show set had been erected around one of the park’s lily-pad strewn ponds (here, those water-lilies were clever imitations); across its centre ran a contemporary imagining of the Tuileries’ tree-lined Grand Allée, a site of promenade since the gardens opened to the public in 1667.
A walk in the park: Dior A/W 2026 by Jonathan Anderson
Indeed, Anderson said this was a collection about ‘seeing and being seen’ in such public settings, a preoccupation of Louis XIV and the aristocracy of his reign. He also invoked the poet Charles Baudelaire, and his 1857 poem À une passante (To a Passer By), in which the narrator observes a mourning woman in a Paris flea market. Struck by what he sees as her innate nobility and ‘majestic’ grief in a ‘lightning flash’ of a moment before she disappears into the crowd, it would immortalise the figure of the flâneur – a detached but voracious observer of the changing city that critic Walter Benjamin said epitomised the modern 19th-century experience.
Anderson, who began the role as sole creative director of the house in June of last year, could also be deemed something of a flâneur: in one viral video posted to social media, he is captured by an anonymous observer wandering the banks of the Seine alone, smoking a cigarette, while recent Instagram posts have seen him capture quotidian moments observed while traversing his adopted city, like the stacks of love-heart padlocks attached onto the poles of a bridge, or the ducks which wander the Tuileries gardens. Though if a flâneur is someone who knows the city intimately (as Benjamin argued in The Arcades Project), Anderson was keen to assert that he retains an outsider’s eye.
‘I will always feel like a tourist in Paris,’ he told designer and podcaster Bella Freud in a conversation which aired before the show’s start. ‘But sometimes being a tourist is quite good, because you see the thing, you kind of edit.’ ‘I suppose it’s a way of finding the things that attach you to a city,’ she added, to his agreement. ‘Especially Paris, it's so grand, it's so composed.’
The idea of the pleasure garden – one which Anderson said also had very British connotations, too – lay at the root of the collection, the idea of dressing up to enter the thrum of city life (indeed, as he noted, in 1667, when the Tuileries opened, there were strict dress codes as to what you could wear inside). ‘A walk through the park becomes a performance,’ was the tagline to the A/W 2026 collection, conjuring a ‘panoply of Parisians... each dressed to play a part, whether mundane or spectacular.’
It made for a collection of eclectic elements; a modern riff on the 19th-century promenade. Several pieces found their roots in historical dress: ruffled Belle Époque gowns were abbreviated into mini skirts replete with bouncing trains (these millefeuilles of frills and ruffles returned throughout, including beneath a flared riff on the house’s Bar Jacket); regal brocade jackets came with peplum hems and rows of fabric-covered buttons; while a pair of dramatic lace gowns had a feeling of deconstruction, as if torn and destroyed by time (indeed, their edges were left frayed).
Others were a play on Parisian bourgeois tropes: scarves were slung across fabrics which mimicked heritage tweed, blazers were adorned with big gold buttons, and shearling jackets were reimagined with wiggly, wave-like hems. But there was a satisfying levity, too, even prettiness – flowers bloomed from dresses, jeans were adorned with crystals, and the polka dot became a defining motif. Even last season’s shrunken Bar Jacket was loosened up: here, an iteration of the Dior classic came in oversized proportions, and was worn with voluminous matching pants.
It felt like a designer gaining confidence in his position, one no doubt bolstered by the overwhelmingly positive critical reception to his first couture show in January. There, he favoured a similarly freewheeling approach: ‘I think the idea of designing things is to make people want something they didn’t want,’ he said at the time. ‘If there’s one thing I’ve learnt at Dior, it’s just about putting ideas out [there].’
Anderson is a designer who has always excelled best when working intuitively and without restriction; here, the collection was created, from start to finish, in under a month. ‘Dior has this giant past, and I had to start there,’ he said. ’Now I feel free to release it from that.’
Stay tuned to our live coverage from Paris Fashion Week A/W 2026 here.