“How do you decode history, to make history?” Two days before his menswear collection debut at men’s fashion week in Paris, newly installed creative director Jonathan Anderson is laying out his vision for Christian Dior. It is a brand that, alongside Chanel, occupies a place at the very pinnacle of French couture and culture, and generates an estimated £9.5bn per a year in revenues for parent company LVMH, according to HSBC estimates.
History is a big thing at Dior. Its founder launched his house with a bravado 1947 collection based on memories of his mother in the Belle Époque, with vast spreading skirts and corseted waists that spun fashion gloriously backwards. “I looked at this very simple thing that I find fascinating about [Christian] Dior, is that [he] looks to the past. To ultimately get the New Look,” Anderson says. His own rear-view glancing is at Dior’s archives. A pair of carnation-pink cargo shorts have the back of a Dior dress from 1948 grafted onto the rear, a looping bustle eating up 15 metres of fabric.
Anderson also proposes his own variation of the Bar jacket, a cinch-waist jutted-hip silhouette presented a keynote suit in that first 1947 collection and that has become every Dior designer’s “Rosebud” moment in capturing the essence of the house. Anderson’s iteration is double-breasted, lightly constructed, without padding but with internal structure to mould the jutting form over the skinny hips of his male models. Its lapels are in faille — “one of Dior’s favourite fabrics” — and the body is in Donegal tweed, made in Ireland (Anderson was born nearby in County Londonderry, Northern Ireland, in 1984). “So it’s like this idea of myself, in Dior,” he says. He is the first Irish designer to head a luxury goods house.
It was only on April 17 this year, at LVMH’s annual general meeting, that owner Bernard Arnault announced that Anderson would head Dior’s menswear; adding, earlier this month, that he would oversee the brand’s womenswear collections also. But Anderson has evidently been thinking about this gig for awhile, consciously or not. “In a weird way, I’m glad that we’re doing men’s first,” he says. “I started my own brand with men’s, and weirdly, I had referenced things I never knew [were part of Dior’s archives].”
It may be a Dior-label collection, but it looks like a collection only Anderson could do. He often speaks about “curating”, and his clothes tend to mix elements that are unexpected, even outrageous and bizarre when juxtaposed. That has made a success of both his eponymous, London-based label JW Anderson, and the Spanish house of Loewe, where he was creative director from 2013 until earlier this year (it is also owned by LVMH).
Anderson came from a merchandising background — his career in fashion actually began alongside Manuela Pavesi, who was the visual communications director for Prada windows — and showed a talent for big picture thinking and unexpected commercial nous from the start. He started his brand JW Anderson in 2008 with a collection of accessories. Menswear came next, then women’s in 2010. By 2013, Anderson attracted the attention of LVMH, who took a minority investment in his brand and appointed him creative director of the then-ailing Loewe, which he resuscitated and powered into a fashion industry leader in creative terms. During his tenure, sales soared from €230mn in 2014 to €1.07bn in 2024, according to Morgan Stanley estimates.
Anderson teased the collection on Instagram with a series of moodboard-style images — there were two Warhol Polaroids, of the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat and Lee Radziwill, Jacqueline Kennedy’s sister. “I think Dior was about archetype, not necessarily style,” Anderson says. “What happens if you use the archetypes to create style? Hence Lee Radziwill, Basquiat, people who had style.” So, perhaps, this is about the way things are worn rather than necessarily what they are? “Exactly.”
So, archetypes are those emblematic Dior shapes: bar jackets, ballgowns, sweeping capes. Anderson’s curated mixes put those bustle-backed shorts, blooming like a flower, under a narrow knit top, a contrast in proportion that feels very Dior, albeit usually aligned to its womenswear rather than men’s. There are sweeping trenchcoats with swirling skirts in New Look proportions. There are formal velvet frock coats worn with high-knotted 18th-century collars and cravats, but no shirt attached, executed in silk-satin or, maybe denim, worn with jeans. In the studio, there’s a model named Angelo walking in a man’s shirt and tie — the shirt is in fine knit, elongated to the ankle, and worn with a backpack.
There are also lots of 18th-century frogged military coats in Ladurée colours, and cropped waistcoats over jeans — “Dior was very obsessed by the 18th century,” Anderson states. Which is true, but you usually would see it in grand ball gowns with a whiff of Versailles. Anderson has precisely reproduced these pieces, down to re-weaving the fabric and embroidering tiny buttons in facsimiles of the originals. “In the show, there is this series of replicas. Which are about things that we have meticulously remade,” he says. “For me, there is like a modernity found in it, when you pop it on today with a chino.”
And, importantly for Dior’s bottom line, there are lots of great bags. His teaser images showed new iterations of the bestselling Book Tote, embroidered with the covers of famous books such as Choderlos de Laclos’ Les Liaisons Dangereuses, or Françoise Sagan’s Bonjour Tristesse. There’s also Bram Stoker’s Dracula, an Irish author. And Dior’s own autobiography, Dior by Dior. “Putting a book on a bag is not the newest thing in the world but I like it because I think it is a narrative,” Anderson says.
Another is collaboration with the American artist Sheila Hicks, something Anderson has long wanted to do at his own label, who has embroidered linen tassels all over the house’s Lady Dior bag. “There’s something I love at the moment, which is men wearing women’s bags. I find it oddly kind of sexy.” Anderson says. “It’s a different mentality. I think Dior would have found it really fascinating.”
He asserts that his Dior isn’t about an ivory tower approach to creativity, but about reflecting what he sees on the street. “I think the job of a designer is to look at what’s going on,” he says. And there is a look of the mix-and-match wardrobes of young men to these clothes, especially those who are fashion-obsessed. “There is something, I think, cocky and affluent.” Which sounds like the Dior men’s customer.
The weight of Dior’s legacy is undeniably heavy for any new designer to take on. Across 78 years, the house has dressed Hollywood royalty, president’s wives, and Rihanna. It is seen as a national treasure and, in the 1940s, was credited with the entire revitalisation of the ailing French fashion industry: by 1949, Dior accounted for 75 per cent of all France’s couture exports, and 5 per cent of French export revenues overall.
Chez Dior, Anderson will produce two haute couture collections a year, and four main women’s ready-to-wear collections, and another four for men. He also oversees accessories and footwear for all, as well as an array of advertising campaigns and promotional imagery. It’s a vast amount of work that has, for 25 years, been split across two different artistic directors. The designer has restructured his own JW Anderson business to allow for the extra workload, and says he will no longer show those collections on the catwalk.
Added to that challenge is a contracting luxury market — sales are estimated to contract by 2 to 5 per cent this year, according to Bain & Co — and a tranche of new designers taking up roles at the grand houses, including Matthieu Blazy at Chanel and Demna Gvasalia, who goes professionally by Demna, at Gucci. “There is a pressure that, somehow, everyone is going to go to these houses and on day one, like Christ-like figures are going to rise,” Anderson says. “Which is impossible. It is not like the 2000s. These businesses are ginormous. And they mean something to everyone.” Indeed, everyone from Parisian tax drivers to Rihanna have an opinion about Dior, something Christian Dior himself mentioned in his 1956 autobiography.
Is he scared of that?
“I’m not scared of it. I think there’s pressure,” Anderson says. “This is the right collection for this house right now. I have to deal with the past. I have to deal with where it’s going. I have to deal with the business right now. It is not as simple as being, like, here is the New Look.” He smiles. “I think we expected the show to be this, like, salvation. The show is not that place anymore.” Indeed, his work has only just begun.
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