It sparkled and bounced, it flowed and it fluttered in the brilliant spring sunshine. Jonathan Anderson couldn’t have had a more charmed day to show his Dior collection en plain air in the Tuileries gardens. “It’s a promenade, the idea of people dressing up to walk in the park,” he said, just before his models traversed a bridge over a waterlily pond, then circled around a glasshouse he’d had built for the audience.
First of all, the Dior Bar jacket: softened as a shrunken gray knitted cardigan with a scrolling peplum over a white multilayered scallop-edged tutu of a skirt, with a bit of a train whisking behind it in the breeze.
Delightful. It set a tone for the collection—the first in which Anderson seemed to have relaxed into designing, letting things drape, lighten and flow. “We’ve taken all the structure out. It’s light,” he remarked, pointing out his way of treating menswear checks as a print on minutely pleated silk, so a trouser suit became as easy as a shirt and pants, or a coat wrapped like dressing gown. “It’s a collection which is fall, but it’s transversal of seasons—it starts to drop in June,” he noted.
Modernizing the inherently dainty femininity of the house of Dior, while also stamping one’s own character on the place, is a daunting challenge for every creative director. That plus the terror of the responsibility of being in charge of a brand so huge it needs to have something to appeal to everyone. Anderson had spelled out the enormity of it all in the faux-horror video he played before his debut womenswear show last season, a potted history depicting “the fear and neurosis of taking on a brand,” as he’d said then.
But this collection showed how far he’s come in trusting his own instincts, not casting around for too many ideas—and in making sense of frothy decorativeness and his own knack for cool simplicity, side by side on the same runway. Filing over the bridge came multiple variations on the Bar jacket, none of them corseted or constricting. One, in gilded lamé, looped up at one side and trimmed with shearling, was worn over pale denim jeans embroidered over in a silvery scallop pattern. A very Andersonian equation that—he being the master of jeans—in combination with a pattern derived from Christian Dior’s famed Juno ballgown of 1949.
It was just a glancing reference rather than a reverent salute, though. Instead of hewing so closely to Dior, there was more than a hint of Paul Poiret about this collection—the balloon pants, the flowered lamé fabrics—but also a nod to the 18th century frock coats Anderson has been obsessed with for years, elaborated here with waterfall collars in shearling, or made entirely of crisp lace.
Picking up on Dior’s love of flowers, Anderson took his own tack: the waterlilies floating in the Tuileries pond. (They were fake, of course.) They’d inspired the raffia flowers blooming on a brilliant asymmetric lace dress, waterlily thong sandals and more. On a sunny day, all of this made for lovely viewing and a heady sensation of zooming in on detail, and zooming out to take in the scenery, the context and the historical resonances.
The sheer grandeur of the vistas from the glasshouse—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,” said Anderson, the Tuileries’ history as royal pleasure gardens and Dior’s power and ownership of its place at the pinnacle of Parisian luxury culture. And the waterlilies and the bridge? Monet’s garden at Giverny, of course—his famous paintings residing just over the way in their gallery at the Orangerie. How did Anderson feel about all this? “I feel relieved,” he exhaled. “Because it’s proven it’s working in the stores.”
