Jonathan Anderson Dior opening look at Paris Fashion Week.
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Jonathan Anderson’s Dior womenswear show opened with a short film by Adam Curtis in the documentary maker’s signature collage technique. The film was screened simultaneously on all three sides of a monumental inverted pyramid suspended from the ceiling of the show venue in Paris’ Jardin des Tuileries and set atop a small gray Dior box.
Dior maison storytelling
It began with proposition ‘Do you dare to enter the house of Dior?’ done ‘house of horrors style’— a question Anderson may or may not have asked himself on taking up the Dior challenge—and proceeded through an assemblage of archival storytelling from runway to atelier and cultural moments from news to movie clips running the gamut from Marlene Dietrich to Diana Princess of Wales with original soundtracks or set to music including Lana del Rey’s anthemic ‘Born to Die.’
The film climaxed with a warp speed fast forward, glitching into white noise like an old fashioned video machine before being seemingly sucked into aforementioned box and the first look, a clean, white trapeze silhouette, segued forth. Fresh start.
The Bar Jacket reimagined at Jonathan Anderson’s Dior at Paris Fashion Week.
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Dior, the unboxing
The pyramid recalls I.M.Pei’s Inverted Pyramid of Paris Louvre Museum fame. Interpreted by the protagonist of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code as a feminine symbol or chalice with its stone pyramid below being a masculine one—taken together as representing the union of the sexes.
Which is exactly what Anderson, a rare combination of the cerebral and the visual, is setting out to do at Dior. For the first time in decades both women’s and men’s lines (the designer presented his men’s debut this summer) are piloted by one creative director and, as evinced today, he has spectacularly unified their design language, with recurring Maison codes—volumes, colors and motifs from capes and cargos (themselves drawn from the archive Delft dress) to bows, ties and his take on the signature Bar Jacket—applied to both collections creating a dialogue between the two—in addition to the leitmotif dialogue between past and present that insinuated itself throughout.
As for predominant silhouette, the trapeze, and we’re back to the triangle.
This kind of cohesive approach vastly strengthens brand identity making for increased brand equity and brand power.
Christian Dior by Jonathan Anderson, cargo skirt Jacket on the runway at Paris Fashion Week.
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A cargo look from Jonathan Anderson’s Dior Men’s collection
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Dior: Commercial successes
While shoring up the bigger picture, Anderson has also created a vast array of commercial successes, in particular, with his accessories—the main revenue drivers for any brand.
Sure fire wins include the 3D envelope bags with their asymmetric top handle sported both on the runway and front row by house ambassadors and influencers including Jisoo, Mickey Madison and the ladylike bow slippers by Rosalía and Willow Smith with their toes in the shape of the Dior D. On the subject of typography, Anderson has also made a return to the original Dior font for his logos. Another keeper from the box.
Other footwear making their runway debut and likewise destined for retail hitmaking were pumps featuring a C and a D (signifying Christian Dior) right and left respectively and dramatic sandals adorned with overblown roses fashioned from swirls of fabric.
Dior in Jonathan Anderson’s words
As Anderson wrote in his show notes, “Daring to enter the house of Dior requires an empathy with its history, a willingness to decode its language, which is part of the collective imagination, and the resoluteness to put all of it in a box.
Not to erase it, but to store it, looking ahead, coming back to bits, traces or entire silhouettes from time to time, like revisiting memories. It’s an ever-evolving sentiment and task that is both complex and instinctive.”
Sandals in the shape of a rose made from swirls of fabric at Jonathan Anderson’s Dior show in Paris.
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Jisoo arrives at Jonathan Anderson’s Dior show in Paris wearing of the new bag silhouettes.
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