One sight first grabs all the attention in Jonathan Anderson’s second women’s collection for Dior: these jeans! Standing there on the side of the Seine, their fit and flow, and their ginormous skirt-like proportions are pushed-over-the-limits in a way that makes you stare and sends fashion taste-buds into instant uproar.
Anderson was quite casual about it. “So here, we have developed a super-lightweight denim,” he started. “But it’s really weird.” The shape began, he said, with the outline of regular jeans, and then putting “couture volume on the side.” It’s the silhouette-exploding, genre-melding technique he’s applied to enlarging men’s cargo shorts with the winged side-cut of Delft, a 1949 Christian Dior haute couture dress, but now with a very different looking outcome. Street yet haute. Ordinaire made extraordinaire.
“It’s the idea of the reality of the girl of Dior. How do we remove the stifling-ness of Dior?” he remarked rhetorically. “It is a French brand. It’s about beginning to re-start the language. Taking time to discover who the Dior woman is.” Or, maybe more accurately, it’s about finding ways to attract Dior women, plural. Pluralist dressing is a growing thing, I would hate to say a trend, because it’s the reverse of the narrow coerciveness that word implies. But take a look at what Matthieu Blazy is doing at Chanel and Sarah Burton has brought to Givenchy: ideas that accommodate a lot of women in lots of different ways. Anderson’s pre-collection does this par excellence. “It’s huge. I want the collections to talk to one another. They don t have to be the same, but when you go to mix it, you enrich the wardrobe you’re shopping for.”
The mission is of course to navigate plurality while maintaining a total focus on brand identity. The assertion of the primacy of the Dior Bar jacket while softening its construction is all over the collection. It can look utterly avant-garde with loopy ribbon whip-stitched around the edges or come over as an everyday cool French-girl uniform as a black blazer worn over an untucked shirt and regular patched-knee jeans.
The collection runs up the scale to utterly luscious yet slightly deconstructed evening dress, through calibrations of cocktail dressing—fluid asymmetry or re-carved tuxedos—and down through tailored coats and trenches. Pausing over a plushly-lined fawn raincoat, Anderson remarked, “it’s a technical nylon with a removable dark shearling collar and liner. I want to make sure that we have these pieces that can work on younger and older, you know, but at the same time, give edge to both.”
The collection is a barometer of the tone of what Anderson is setting out to do at Dior, how he’s engaging with the maison’s past and present, and how much of his own personality and formidable experience he’s stamping on it. There’s a joyful, off-hand accomplishment in the delightfully-Dior Lyons moire silk strapless dresses, tied up in the flourish of a knot on one hip, and with a puff of tulle petticoat escaping at the side (the cerulean one was worn by Sunday Rose Kidman Urban when she presented Anderson with the Designer of the Year trophy at the London Fashion Awards a couple of weeks ago). There’s all the jewelry, which Anderson proved himself to have such a flair for at Loewe, now blossoming into oversized metal hydrangea earrings, dangling mixed-media earrings composed of crystal chunks, studded cabochon pearls and metallic bows, and playful ‘mechanical’ rings that spring open to reveal “things like ladybirds.”
Anderson sees himself in the long line of designers who have occupied the house since Monsieur Dior, cherry-picking and building on what they did. He pointed out that, in slip dresses and sequined slithers “we’re bringing bias cut back into the house. It hasn’t been here since John Galliano.” Back to the jeans, now: It was his predecessor Maria Grazia Chiuri who established denim in the house. Anderson has never been seen wearing anything but jeans himself, of course. Denim’s a staple he knows inside out, having designed it for his own brand, Loewe, and Uniqlo for years. But now, reveling in the technical fabrication resources at Dior, he’s taking it other places.
One of them is to the highest of the haute: a richly embroidered 18th-century style dark denim tailcoat, waistcoat, and bootcut jeans. Already shown in his menswear pre-collection, it’s part of the ethos of “the shared wardrobe” Anderson is bringing to Dior. Not just because he’s the first to be designing both collections, but because he brought that fluidity to fashion from the get-go of his career as a twenty-something in London.
And the other approach is the fluid jeans: exquisitely-woven dirty-look denim poured into the context of Dior flou. By placing it on the street and creating a style moment he’s guaranteed to set the internet blazing without even having a show. That too is very Jonathan Anderson. Alongside his genius for making merchandise useful there’s also his maverick belief in putting out fashion with a capital F.
Like it? Hate it? Everyone will be hot-taking, and that’s part of the game too. Keep looking, though. After enough repetitions of the idea, it’s astonishing how normalized the silhouette becomes. The only frustration is that you want to see these things move. Is that because Anderson’s saving up the reveal of something along those liquid lines for his first couture show in January? With the sheer level of craft already exerted in this ready-to-wear collection it’s pretty spectacular to imagine what he could put on next.
