October 2, 2025 |
How do you prepare for the biggest day of your fashion life? For Dior’s Jonathan Anderson, presenting his debut women’s collection, it started with an ice bath for his face.
Pressure? One can only imagine the weight of expectation heaped upon him. Dior is the jewel of French fashion. A global power house. A cultural force. The opening reels of the film, (made by acclaimed documentary maker Adam Curtis) which opened the show, asked: “Do you dare enter the house of Dior?”
Dare? Anderson is as fearless as they come, although at a preview of the collection, even he admitted that entering Dior’s hallowed couture atelier for the first time was “scary”.
He faced the fear and did it anyway.
His first look a white bell-shaped dress in hand-pleated silk tied into two knots, had the skilled hands of the atelier all over it. Its lampshade construction was, he said, “very light. It’s done with a Dior structure, to create the volume.”
One by one, his models walked onto a set designed by the director Luca Guadagnino, and introduced a radically new Dior era.
Anderson put his own stamp on Dior references, which he took from different eras. He also adapted for women, ideas introduced within his debut menswear collection. “It’s going to keep compounding” he said of the cross-pollination of ideas cascading through both men’s and women’s collections. For the first time in Dior’s history both collections have been designed by the same person.
Anderson’s job is to keep Dior relevant and what interests him about how we dress now is, “This tension between dressing up and reality.” He’s good at both, able to serve what he called “overt prettiness, the idea of the princess,” with sheer lace gowns with winged, wired skirts, bubble hemmed miniskirts and forget-me-not micro florals embroidered all over a dress that was cut, for the modern princess, simply as a T-shirt. “For me it is the Dior fantasy part,” he said of these flights of feminine fancy, many worn with floral rosette mules and swooping hats designed by Stephen Jones.
But he also sent out plenty of reality in the form of perfectly preppy polo top and chinos, or a high neck, bow collar shirt worn with a pink denim mini skirt. Both vibes have a place in the big Dior world he’s creating.
Parallels with his menswear are all part of his strategy. “We’ve taken the men’s jacket from the opening look and have redone it for women,” he said. It looked great with a short skirt with dramatic folds at the back based on the 1948 couture dress named Delft – the same piece that inspired those conceptual cargo pants in his mens collection. Knit capes and jeans combos also echoed the mens, as did the high neck bow shirts, worn with miniskirts.
The collection was rich with Dior references. The Bar jacket came in shrunken almost childlike proportions, and was worn with a bell shaped mini skirt that bounced with every step, part of his desire to create movement from static archive silhouettes. A dramatic, high, back-to-front lace collar came from a look designed by Saint Laurent during his tenure. A swagged white gown embellished with hydrangeas at the hips was based on a 1953 design by Dior. The jutting, architectural hip line of several pieces, echoed that of the 1952 Cigale dress. The white petal and crystal gown that closed the show was a mini version of the 1949 Junon gown.
Reflecting on his Dior immersion so far, the designer said, “Every day, I feel like I learn something from all the people inside it because what they want to do is create something, which is fashion.”
He served that with a capital F. Dior has a new look.
Photography courtesy of Dior.
