‘Change is inevitable’: Jonathan Anderson’s first Dior womenswear collection recodes the house’s archive

At Loewe, Jonathan Anderson was as much a cultural curator as he was a clothing designer. At Dior, the Parisian house where he presented his debut womenswear collection this afternoon, he looks to be forging a similar path. Entering the purpose-built showspace, guests were greeted by an inverted pyramid protruding from the ceiling – not unlike modernist architect I.M. Pei’s audacious entranceway for the Louvre, just a short walk away across the Jardin de Tulleries – which a card left on each attendee’s seat credited to the Italian film director Luca Guadagnino and production designer Stefano Baisi (Anderson worked with both on Queer as the 2024 movie’s costume designer; here, they were responsible for ‘scenography’).

Jonathan Anderson's first Dior womenswear collection recodes the archive

As the show began, the pyramid transformed into a screen for a specially commissioned film by British director Adam Curtis, best known for his documentaries on individualism, power, and the collapse of 20th-century ideologies, including The Century of the Self, HyperNormalisation, and the recent 2025 series Shifty, which examined late-20th-century Britain under Conservative rule. Collaging archival footage in his atmospheric style, the short film gathered moments from the house’s near-eight-decade-long history, from clips of Christian Dior himself to collections from the designers at the house who followed, including John Galliano and Maria Grazia Chiuri, which flashed across the screens at the show’s start (interspersed horror movie scenes lent the feeling of anxiety which pulsates through Curtis’ work).

Beneath the pyramid’s point was the box guests had received the week prior, containing the show’s invitation – a plate of walnuts rendered entirely in china, inspired by ceramic curiosities Anderson had discovered in the house’s archive. The illusion was that the footage was emerging, genie-like, from inside. ‘Daring to enter the house of Dior requires an empathy with its history, a willingness to decode its language, which is part of the collective imagination, and the resoluteness to put all of it in a box,’ said Anderson via the collection notes. ‘Not to erase it, but to store it, looking ahead, coming back to bits, traces or entire silhouettes from time to time, like revisiting memories.’

Anderson described his approach as having an ‘empathy’ for the past, though the film’s end – a shuddering rush of crackled footage before the screen turned a bright, optic white – was symbolic of a clean slate, a shedding of the weight of history. ‘Change is inevitable,’ he said in typically direct manner, presenting a collection which took elements of the archive and refracted them in his inventive, idiosyncratic style, warping archival silhouettes into strange and intriguing new proportions. Like the Tailleur Bar suit, which was shrunken and cropped in size, with a minuscule, abbreviated pleated skirt, while another riff on the nipped-waist Bar jacket scooped up at the front, as if tied like a bow. Indeed, the bow was a recurring motif: a series of bow ties (worn with matching shirts and skirts) reflected the subversion of formalwear in his menswear collection for the house back in June, while hourglass dresses looked like they had been constructed from twists of fabric, tied at the end with bows.

A sense of theatricality came in dramatic cornette-style headwear and face-covering trims of lace inspired by another archival design. Micro-mini skirts were constructed from frothy millefeuille layers of fabric, while the distinctive cantilevered waistline of Christian Dior’s 1952 La Cigale dress seemed to inspire the sculpted silhouette of trapeze dresses and double-breasted overcoats, which folded cleverly across their front. More grounded in reality were mini leather skirts (an abbreviated silhouette ran throughout), slouchy suede handbags with metal ‘Dior’ hardware embedded in their straps, and pointed pumps adorned with the house’s signature ’C’ on one foot, and ‘D’ on the other. Anderson said the collection was built on this ‘tension’ – between fantasy and reality, ‘dressing as a way to become a character on the stage that is life’.

More so than the menswear show earlier this year, there was a clarity to Anderson’s vision, which seeks to imagine the tropes of Dior – namely, an architectural construction combined with a mood of femininity and romance – in a sharp, contemporary style. This is only becoming clearer as he builds out his universe: alongside the collaborations with Guadagnino and Curtis, his trio of muses – and new house ambassadors – Mia Goth, Greta Lee and Mikey Madison, were in attendance today and watched on from the front row. The bolder looks on the runway might be more suited for their upcoming red carpet appearances than the everyday, but Anderson – a strong-willed designer who brims with confidence – knows that to build a brand requires bravery, vision and instinct, rather than safety. It’s how he built Loewe into a mega brand – now, with Dior, and the eyes of the world watching, this unwavering approach continues. Call it his New Look.

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