Dior Haute Couture 26: Florals? For spring? It really is Groundbreaking!
“Florals? For Spring? Groundbreaking.” Miranda Priestly remarks with irony in The Devil Wears Prada. However, if you take a maison like Dior, which is intimately linked to the femininity of florals, and add a touch of J.W. Anderson’s creativity, you do have a groundbreaking, beautiful collection.
The awaited debut of Anderson for Haute Couture was presented on the 26th of January and marked the second womenswear collection of the designer, after his ready-to-wear collection presented last September.
Sophomore collections tend to carry heavy weight when it comes to fashion designers. They have the power to strengthen the messages that designers want to convey. Additionally, these collections are often a chance for the creative director to signal how they understand the codes of the maison, how they want to interpret them, and which new shapes and textures will mark their time at the house. Jonathan Anderson, as usual, understood the assignment.
This collection is positioned to illustrate what the defining shapes will be. We had already seen his take on the Bar Jacket, which he reimagined with its cinched waist emphasized by a bow. This silhouette was introduced in his ready-to-wear show and was remade with a more sumptuous fabric for this Haute Couture show. This silky texture can also be seen through elegant, long gowns that served as a reference to Galliano’s time at the house, with their oriental-inspired flower motifs.
The inspiration for this collection did, in fact, start with John Galliano, former creative director of the maison, who was invited to the atelier by J.W. Anderson before his first womenswear show for Dior. Galliano brought a Tesco bag with snacks for the team and two posies of cyclamen, which Anderson shared in an Instagram post. These were also distributed to the press and attendees of the show. “The most beautiful flowers I had ever seen, so I took this as a starting point so that everyone would receive the same posy of flowers I had received,” declared the creative director on Instagram.
Where the textiles were sumptuous and elegant, the shapes were daring; many of these seemed to draw inspiration from Magdalene Odundo’s art, proving Anderson’s ability to bridge fashion with craft. Her work inspired the exaggerated tensions and refined surfaces present in the collection, in particular the bulbous skirts and dresses, which, through finely pleated tulle fabric, were able to lighten the tension of the voluptuous shape.
Bags continue to signal the house’s ability to convey stories, perhaps as a defiance of AI and the increase in technologies used to generate content or images. The more artisanship, craft, and time that go into a bag, the harder it is for AI to recreate it. These whimsical accessories seem to be a continuation of the snail, the frog, or the shamrock, which are now symbols of J.W. Anderson’s time at Dior.
Flowers presented themselves in the form of accessories like earrings and shoes, but also in magnificent clothing pieces like skirts and gowns, which seem a reminiscence of Raf Simons’ time as creative director, although with a completely new take on shapes and construction.
The newer generations of fashion adepts grew up with Raf Simons’ Dior and likely associate the maison with codes that leaned into hyper-femininity or the architectural minimalism that characterized his time at the house.
Jonathan Anderson thought of the past and future of the maison while creating novel silhouettes made for the woman of today. Elements such as thin tank tops combined with evening silky fabrics, and the elegant silhouettes of the outerwear, are what made this collection so distinctively Anderson.
When presenting a collection for a firm such as Dior, which has passed through several creative directors, one must have the ability to nod to past creative directors to preserve and honor the history of the house, while innovating so future generations can look back and draw inspiration. And that is exactly the path that Anderson has chosen.
Words: @edugilhurta