“Do You Dare Enter the House of Dior?” The opening line of the video that Jonathan Anderson commissioned from the British social documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis said it all about the momentous and terrifying threshold the 40-year-old creative director was about cross with his first womenswear show for this national French institution. Yes, Anderson has dared: of course he has, his is one of the two most vastly important new appointments to be rocking the fashion world this season, and he’s already accomplished his first, much delighted-over men’s Dior show.
Yet, with his talent for jangling an unexpected marketing nerve, he began the debut of his life by putting the fear of it right out there in the middle of the room. Curtis’s video, screened on a giant inverted pyramid, intercut horror movie clips chopped up with high-speed flashes of footage of all the designers who’ve preceded Anderson: Yves Saint Laurent, Marc Bohan, Gianfranco Ferré, John Galliano, Raf Simons, Kris Van Assche, Kim Jones and Maria Grazia Chiuri.
Naturally, Christian Dior was up there, too—next, that is, to Marlene Dietrich in Hitchcock’s contemporaneous 1950 black and white movie Stage Fright. (Curtis is a genius juxtaposer of telling references.) Was Anderson suffering a case of stage fright as well? In his office ahead of the show he said Curtis had had carte blanche to produce what he liked. “I wanted to show how many people have been at the house. But, yes, he’s kind of shown the fear and neurosis of taking on a brand,” he agreed. “Of course it’s a challenge! But at the end of it, the video winds backwards and appears to fall into the Dior shoe box on the ground. I thought of it like the shoe box everyone has in their house of old photos and memories. So I can open it, take from it, shut it and not look at. Like everyone does.”
Truth to tell, Anderson is not afraid of history; in fact, he revels in it. Discovering and framing aspects of the past is part of what made him so successful in transforming Loewe from a dull leather company into a vibrant art-culture-fashion phenomenon. His knack for selecting Dior historical modes and apparently randomly putting them together with genres of things that have nothing to do them already got nicely underway in his men’s show: tweed bar jacket and flying-buttress cargo shorts, 18th-century frock coats and white jeans and so on. Rep ties on chambray shirts. All of this, enough to shift a fashion aesthetic.
With his women’s debut, it was a little bit different, and a little bit the same. His opening gambit: a white bell-shaped crini dress with white jersey whirled around it, finished with two bows. Then, a few steps in, a black tuxedo with a flying back-peplum, worn with a lopped-off denim mini and a conceptual tricorne by the genius Dior milliner Stephen Jones. Some way in, there was the inevitable icon of the maison, the Bar jacket, in sparkly green Irish Donegal tweed, but now shrunk like Alice in Wonderland to tiny little-girl proportions, with a teeny pleated skirt to match.
The traditions set by M. Dior must be curtseyed to by every designer, but they can’t act as a straight jacket to creativity. Anderson said he’d been grateful that John Galliano had informally met him when he began. Galliano’s advice, he said, “was the more you love the brand, the more it will give you back. I thought that was a beautiful analogy.”
The import of that advice: don’t kick against the traces of the past too much. Work with them. At the same time, Anderson sees his mission as “blurring the idea of decades together,” and to take away some of the burden of “too much reverence” around Dior. Maria Grazia Chiuri already did the job of liberating Dior from its corsets, and Anderson is not going back on it. Instead, his idea of the lace dress was even lighter than Chiuri’s. One of them, a wisp of a black chantilly lace lingerie dress, fanned out into butterfly-like wings in the back.
That shape, in its lightest form, emulated the sticking-out buttresses that Dior created in his Cigale dress. It’s a shape that’s obsessed and influenced Anderson for years. In this manifestation, it chimed with his idea about Dior’s aspect of being a classic “princess fantasy.” This princess narrative also spun through Anderson’s cute forget-me-not prints and embroideries on chiffon, the bubble dresses and skirts.
But Anderson has always been most fashion forward the weirder and more unexpected he is. That nuts-but-amazing side came out in a top with a high frill of lace half covering the face and cascading down the back of a red satin pleated top. With her tricorne and voluminous cargo trousers, the model looked like some kind of fashion highwayman in the house.
Overall, Anderson said he was “looking at the tension, the push-and-pull between dressing up and dressing down.” He brought his own favorite polo shirts and jeans to the scene as well. Maybe that is not what the existing Dior customer calls fashion—although perhaps both the conventional and the avant-garde shopper will very much agree on the simple-yet-stylish array of capes in the collection. Capes for occasions, everyday-cosy capes for the street.
Anderson noted he’d only had two months to get this collection done. As the history buff he is, he said he’s very aware that “things take time.” Working with the Dior ateliers to create his “own hand” is much of the mission. Already, he’s softened the Lady Dior bag into a suede bowling bag shape, and started on reviving Roger Vivier’s delightful Louis heel pumps. One pair had bunny ears poking up from its toes. Charming and cute for some, weird and fantastical for others, and with swathes of sellable merchandise in between: Anderson has pulled off this feat before at Loewe. Those who stood to applaud him at the end of the show are convinced he’s about to revolutionize Dior’s appeal in the same way.
