Jonathan Anderson Recasts Dior’s Legacy With Couture That Courts Shock
Jonathan Anderson Recasts Dior’s Legacy With Couture That Courts Shock
At the rarefied pinnacle of fashion, Paris haute couture exists on two parallel planes. For elite clients, billionaires chasing best-dressed rankings and actors preparing for awards season, it is an opportunity to acquire garments whose prices rival Parisian real estate. For the industry itself, couture week is about prestige: a competitive display of power among fashion’s most storied houses. This season, with new creative leadership at both Dior and Chanel, that rivalry felt particularly charged.
On Monday morning, the couture theatre was in full swing. Teyana Taylor appeared front row at Schiaparelli, crowned in diamonds, as the house gears up for a major exhibition at London’s V&A Museum. Later that day, beneath a mirrored runway and a floating canopy of moss and silk blooms in the gardens of the Musée Rodin, Dior’s show was paused for an hour, all eyes waiting for Rihanna to arrive, wrapped in a sculptural black satin coat.
For Jonathan Anderson, this marked a defining moment. The 41-year-old Northern Irish designer, appointed creative director of Dior last year, used his first haute couture collection not to replicate the house’s familiar codes, but to bend them. Christian Dior’s legendary 1947 New Look – its cinched waist and sculpted curves, re-emerged as a fluid silk georgette cocktail dress, its pleats spiralling around the body with the energy of wet clay shaped on a potter’s wheel. The form nodded to the work of Kenyan-born British ceramicist Dame Magdalene Odundo, whose pieces provided a conceptual backbone for the collection.
Jonathan Anderson Recasts Dior’s Legacy With Couture That Courts Shock
Elsewhere, the house’s beloved floral language was pushed into playful excess. Cyclamen blooms, once delicate motifs, became oversized earmuffs, whimsical, surreal and unapologetically impractical. The idea reportedly stemmed from a bouquet once gifted to the Dior atelier by John Galliano, a former creative director of the house, weaving layers of personal and institutional memory into Anderson’s narrative.
Rather than leaning into nostalgia for mid-century femininity, Anderson appears intent on reawakening Dior’s more disruptive spirit. Speaking ahead of the show, he reflected on the house’s founder as a radical force rather than a conservative one. Christian Dior, he noted, transformed fashion in less than a decade, unsettling audiences with collections that now read as timeless but were once deeply controversial. Dior’s sudden death in 1957 only sharpened the myth.
That sense of urgency and impermanence underpins Anderson’s approach. He has been candid about resisting formulas, even when the pressure to deliver immediate clarity is intense. Dior, he argues, is too vast to be resolved overnight. Creativity, in his view, must remain in motion; a house that becomes too fixed risks becoming predictable.
This refusal of easy beauty has divided opinion, but Anderson is convinced that provocation has always been good business at Dior. Shock, he suggests, has commercial value. That belief was tempered by shrewd accessories designed to anchor the collection financially: loafers stamped with cameo-style Dior insignia, collectable clutches, and stoles draped to ensure the house name was always visible. The message was clear: experimentation and profitability need not be mutually exclusive.
Jonathan Anderson Recasts Dior’s Legacy With Couture That Courts Shock
The collection will remain on view at the Musée Rodin for a week-long public exhibition beginning 28 January, displayed alongside archival Dior looks and Odundo’s ceramics, offering visitors a rare opportunity to trace the dialogue between past and present.
Away from the runway, the week delivered a quieter but significant moment for Victoria Beckham. Amid a turbulent period for the designer, she was awarded the Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters at a ceremony hosted by France’s culture minister, Rachida Dati. The honour recognises Beckham’s contribution to Paris Fashion Week, where she has shown consistently since 2022.
Accompanied by her husband, David and their three youngest children, Beckham made her first public appearance since recent family headlines. Dressed simply in black, she delivered a brief, composed speech thanking her family for their belief in her vision, calling the award a profound acknowledgement of years of dedication.
The industry turnout spoke volumes. Anna Wintour, Edward Enninful, Helena Christensen, Haider Ackermann, Juergen Teller, and power players Antoine Arnault and François Pinault were among those who offered a sustained standing ovation. Dati praised Beckham as a contemporary force who has helped Paris continue to shine, describing her as a global figure with a special place in French cultural life.
In a week defined by spectacle, ambition and shifting power, couture once again proved that fashion’s past is never static; it is endlessly rewritten by those bold enough to challenge it.
