It sparkles and bounces, it flows and it flutters in the glorious spring sunshine. Jonathan Anderson couldn’t have had a more glamorous day than to show his Dior collection in plain air in the gardens of the Tuileries. “It’s a promenade, the idea of people getting dressed for a walk in the park,” he said, before his models walked across a bridge over a pool of water, then circled around a glass house he had built for the audience.
First, the Dior Bar Jacket: a shrunken gray knit softened like a cardigan with a scrolling peplum over a white multilayered scallop-edged tutu of a skirt, with a little train plowing in the breeze behind.
Delightful. It set a tone for the collection – the first in which Anderson felt comfortable designing, letting things be ready, light and flowing. “We’ve taken out all the structure. It’s light,” he notes, noting that the menswear check is used as a print on mint-pleated silk, so a trouser suit becomes as simple as a shirt and pants, or a coat wrapped as a dressing gown. “It’s a collection that’s fall, but it’s a change of seasons—it starts to fall in June,” he noted.
Modernizing the innately elegant femininity of the House of Dior, while also stamping the space with its own character, is a daunting challenge for any creative director. Also, the terror of being in charge of a brand is so great that it has to have something to appeal to everyone. Anderson described the magnitude of it all in a faux-horror video played before her debut womenswear show last season, depicting the “fear and neurosis of taking on a brand,” as she put it at the time.
But the collection showed how far he’s come in trusting his instincts, not going for too many ideas and creating a sense of edginess, and building his knack for cool simplicity side-by-side on the same runway. Filing at the bridge brought several variations on the bar jacket, none of them corseted or tight. One, in golden lamé, draped on one side and trimmed with shears, was embroidered in a silver scallop pattern on pale denim jeans. A very Andersonian equation that he is the master of jeans—coupled with a pattern derived from Christian Dior’s iconic Juno ball gown of 1949.
Although it was merely a glancing reference rather than a devotional greeting. Instead of hewing so closely to Dior, the collection had more than a hint of Paul Poirot—balloon pants, floral lamé dresses—but also a nod to the 18th-century frock coat that Anderson has been obsessed with for years, here with waterfall collars shearling or fully tailored.
Picking up on Dior’s love of flowers, Anderson took his own: water lilies floating in the Tuileries pond. (They were fake, of course.) They inspired blooming raffia flowers on a stunning asymmetrical lace dress, waterlily thong sandals and more. On a sunny day, it’s all made for zooming in on beautiful views and detail, and zooming out to see landscape, context and historical resonance.
The sheer majesty of the views from the glass house — views of the Louvre in one direction, the obelisk of the Place de la Concorde in the other — spoke to “the idea of the city,” Anderson said, of the Tuileries’ history as royal pleasure gardens and Dior’s power and ownership of its place at the height of Parisian culture. And water lilies and bridges? Monet’s garden at Giverny, of course—his famous paintings live just down the road in his gallery at the Orangery. How did Anderson feel about it all? “I feel relieved,” he breathed. “Because it’s been proven to work in stores.”
