On Instagram, a few days prior to his debut haute couture collection for Dior, Jonathan Anderson posted a photograph of a Tesco shopping bag next to a small posy of wild cyclamen. ‘Last year, just before my first women’s show for Dior, the first person I wanted to show the collection to was John Galliano,’ the Irish designer explained in the caption below. ‘John very kindly came with two posies of cyclamen tied with black silk ribbons and a bag of cakes and sweets from Tesco for the team. [They were] the most beautiful flowers I‘d ever seen.’
He viewed them as something of a baton pass; Galliano was the house’s creative director for 14 years in its heady 2000s heyday (after leaving the house in 2011, he would later go on to be creative director of Maison Margiela, a role he held for ten years until 2025). ‘When I was at university, he was like a hero,’ he told Business of Fashion. ‘He is Dior in the public imagination, still to this day, because what he built was so big in terms of the rebirth of fashion. I loved the idea of him being back at Dior. I felt like it was a full-circle moment.’
Jonathan Anderson makes his Dior haute couture debut
It is why each of the 730-or-so guests attending the designer’s haute couture show in Paris this afternoon received a small posy of cyclamen, encased in a white box, alongside the show’s invitation. It is also why, on entering the show space, the ceiling was transformed into an upside-down meadow of more blooming cyclamen, scenting the mirrored room – reclaimed from Anderson’s menswear show held last week – with the smell of mossy woodland. Via the collection notes, he said that these flowers were symbols of ‘creative continuity’ – a physical manifestation of the exchange between Galliano and himself, or any of the other of the creative directors who have defined Dior’s 79-year history, all the way back to Christian Dior himself.
More than any of the other collections produced by the house (Anderson oversees Dior’s men’s and women’s ready-to-wear collections, as well as Cruise and Pre-Fall), haute couture requires the greatest communion with the past. For one, haute couture is the oldest and most revered form of Parisian dressmaking, its strict traditions fastidiously upheld by the Fédération de la Haute Couture et de la Mode. But at Dior, it is also the crown jewel of the empire: despite being available to the rarefied few (estimates for couture clients worldwide sit at around 5,000), the language of haute couture infiltrates every part of the house, from ready-to-wear to fragrance and jewellery.
As is Anderson’s style, the S/S 2026 couture collection began with a trail of references and mementoes drawn from across eras. A vase by ceramic artist Magdalene Odundo (a longtime collaborator of the designer) inspired the curving, balloon-like shape of the opening trio of dresses (among his first creations for the house, they were crafted from featherweight silk tulle and wire to find form without heaviness); cameo brooches, meticulously sourced by Anderson from vintage sellers, became adornments, while shards of meteorites and fossils were repurposed into jewellery. Meanwhile, cyclamen were transformed into pom-pom earrings or floral embellishments on gowns.
‘There’s this element in the show of how to upcycle things,’ he said in a preview before the show. ‘Like, how do we take something and reinvent it? Things are found, and then reassembled.’
This act of reassembly also drew him towards nature, a longtime fascination of Monsieur Dior, whose love of gardening was fostered in childhood, watching his mother tend the rose garden at their seaside home, Villa Les Rhumbs, in Normandy. ‘I kind of like the cliché that Dior is about the flower – it's this kind of obsessiveness over nature,’ he said. Though Anderson wanted the play with the reference: hyper-real flowers were made out of silk or enamel (‘it’s this idea of what’s fake and real’), while graphics were drawn from images of butterflies and flowers zoomed in until they became abstracted. ‘When you zoom in or zoom out, they become other things. They can be incredibly beautiful, or incredibly ugly.’
It lent the collection a feeling of eclecticism, whereby intriguing forms emerged in bold fabrications: bulbous protrusions of lilac satin erupted from waistlines; sculptural gowns were constructed from delicate shards of pearlescent shell, while bell-shaped tops ballooned around the body and were veiled with net. Alongside, an homage to Galliano came through a series of sinuous bias-cut gowns (the silhouette was the designer’s signature at Dior), as well as what felt like a nod to Raf Simons – creative director of womenswear for the house from 2012-2015 – in a restrained black coat, flared at the hips, which felt reminiscent of the Belgian designer’s own haute couture debut (a show immortalised in the 2014 documentary, Dior and I). Anderson called it a ‘Wunderkammer’ of ideas, and there was joy and colour to be found in this freewheeling approach.
Anderson said that the last few months creating this collection have been like undertaking a ‘PhD in haute couture’. He has sat through hours-long fittings to get the perfect shape of a jacket – one which hinges on changes of just a few millimetres of fabric – and has been fascinated by the silence of the haute couture atelier (each stitch is done by hand, rather than by machine). ‘You realise that that's why we love clothing – it's this idea of the make,’ he said. ‘Couture is really a dying craft; it’s nearly instinct. There are only a few houses doing it. So in a weird way, it’s about protecting that.’
As custodian of the house, this is a task he takes seriously. After the show, the runway space will become an exhibition titled ‘Grammar and Form’, which will comprise pieces from the collection in ‘conversation’ with works by Christian Dior and Odundo’s ceramics. The idea, he says, is to ‘demystify couture and inspire the next generation to ensure its future’. Though one senses that haute couture is already in its renaissance: tomorrow, Matthieu Blazy, another lauded young designer, will make his own haute couture debut at Chanel, a fellow behemoth of Parisian style. Like Anderson, he looks set to inject fresh energy into the medium.
‘I think what is nice is that [as a team] we’re exploring – it is not about working out the idea before we start, or working out the end customer, because ultimately, we don’t know what people want,’ says Anderson, who sees the couture atelier as a ‘lab-like’ space for ideas. ‘That’s the whole point. I think the idea of designing things is to make people want something they didn’t want. If there’s one thing I’ve learnt at Dior, it’s just about putting ideas out.’
He continues, ‘I think it’s about enjoying the process of making. It’s like the cyclamen. After three days, it had wilted, and I wanted to remake it, to preserve it. But that's like a week-and-a-half's work for someone; every single thing is done by hand. But then you realise if we don’t do it, [craft like this] will disappear. It’s for the house of Dior, not just for me.’
