Anderson’s Dior womenswear debut is a montage of ideas, but not a ‘New Look’

By THOMAS ADAMSON
AP Fashion Writer

PARIS (AP) — No other show so far at Paris Fashion Week has drawn such a feverish crush of celebrities, designers and press.

All eyes were on Jonathan Anderson — the Northern Irish designer who has already transformed Loewe into a global powerhouse of wit and craft — as he unveiled his first Dior womenswear collection on Wednesday.

Around him, the front row glittered with Johnny Depp, Rosalia, Jisoo, Jennifer Lawrence, Rosamund Pike, Charlize Theron, Anya Taylor-Joy, Willow Smith, Mikey Madison and Jenna Ortega, celebrity wattage setting the stakes before a single look appeared.

The weight of history was everywhere. Dior was the fashion house that recrowned Paris as the world’s capital of fashion in 1947, when Christian Dior unveiled the “New Look.” That Bar jacket and wasp-waisted silhouette made headlines across a world still emerging from war. Every Dior designer since — from Yves Saint Laurent to John Galliano, Raf Simons and Maria Grazia Chiuri — has been judged by how they wrestle with that legacy.

Anderson, 41, is the first in Dior’s history to oversee both men’s and women’s lines, a responsibility with enormous cultural and commercial stakes.

All eyes on Anderson

The staging dramatized the moment. A giant inverted pyramid, echoing the Louvre, loomed over the runway as a montage of Dior’s imagery flickered across it at breakneck speed — a horror filmlike splice of icons and ghosts. The message: the weight of heritage, fractured and unsettled.

What followed was not a revolution but a series of probing gestures. Anderson has never been one to detonate house codes; at Loewe, and again in his Dior men’s debut in June, his method has been to bend and reframe. That instinct carried through here. Silhouettes slouched, almost defiantly loose. Admiral visors capped the brow. Black lace flared like bows — or bats — from the back. Most striking was the recurring “double balloon” form hidden under skirts, producing a strange, bouncing, Versailles-like silhouette — a sly riff on 18th-century panniers made uncanny for the present.

Icons revisited, but no ‘New Look’ moment

The Bar jacket — the staple of Dior’s revolutionary New Look — was reimagined off-kilter, its peplum hoisted toward the bust, the hourglass skewed into something surreal. On the body, it sometimes looked ill-fitting, as if the poetry of the idea fought against proportion. This is what Dior called “boxing and unboxing history,” a phrase that captured Anderson’s push-pull with the archive.

The result echoed his menswear: not a “New Look” with a capital N — as one critic put it — but a constellation of eclectic ideas. Critics who wanted a single, defining jolt — a Slimane-style bolt of clarity or a Simons-like manifesto — will have left underwhelmed. Instead, Anderson’s Dior unfolded like his opening montage: fragmentary and deliberately unresolved — in step with the house’s framing of the collection as “a feeling of harmony and tension.”

There were undeniable wins. The quality of the clothes’ fabrics, finish and precise craft reinforced Dior’s atelier power. Historical references felt alive, not embalmed. And there was commercial oxygen in separates, ballooned skirts, accessories with bite.

Yet drawbacks lingered. The Hitchcockian menace of the opening film was never fully matched on the runway. The celebrity crush risked overshadowing the message. And the absence of one commanding silhouette means Anderson’s Dior remains, for now, a work in progress.

Changes afoot

Still, the magnitude of this debut can’t be overstated. Anderson is part of a rare season of firsts: Matthieu Blazy’s first Chanel collection arrives next week, Pierpaolo Piccioli unveils his debut at Balenciaga on Oct. 4, and Demna has just made his Gucci debut in Milan via a Spike Jonze–directed film event. Together, they form a reshuffle that’s rewriting the luxury map.

Wednesday was less coronation than prologue: understated in tone, radical in detail, the show signaled the beginning of many possible paths.