Dior’s high-concept collection riffed on how clothing turns fabric into sculpture. Photograph: Kenzo Tribouillard/AFP/Getty Images View image in fullscreen Dior’s high-concept collection riffed on how clothing turns fabric into sculpture. Photograph: Kenzo Tribouillard/AFP/Getty Images Dior Jonathan Anderson delivers high-concept Dior collection that celebrates the sculptural Hot on heels of creating Taylor Swift’s wedding dress, designer brings his re-energising razzmatazz to Paris catwalk
Prefer the Guardian on Google The one person in the fashion industry who doesn’t want to talk about Taylor Swift’s as-yet-unrevealed wedding dress is the man who actually knows what it looks like. “It was a big honour,” was all that Dior’s Jonathan Anderson would say about dressing America’s de facto royal wedding. “But no, I can’t tell you anything about it. It will all come out in due course. It was a joy to work with her and we became very good friends. It is an emotional thing, doing someone’s wedding.”
View image in fullscreen Jonathan Anderson is re-energising Dior with an offbeat creative energy. Photograph: Kenzo Tribouillard/AFP/Getty Images Instead, Anderson wanted to talk about a very different American artist, sculptor Lynda Benglis, whose sensual slumped hunks of smelted metal inspired his haute couture collection. A wooden pavilion built for the show in the gardens of the Rodin Museum was soundtracked with the flutter of paper fans along the front row, and the haughty silhouettes of couture seemed liquefied in the city heat. A skirt of silver-foiled petals lapped and shimmered like molten lava. A tailored Bar jacket trailed threads of chiffon at the hem like drips of ice-cream down a cone.
Read more This is how haute couture operates. The most exclusive branch of fashion is a high-rolling play for mass-culture eyeballs and a painstaking laboratory for artistic expression in which evening bags are crafted from fragments of 18th-century Indian chintz fabric in a commentary on the enmeshment of decorative traditions across cultures.
Hot on the heels of the coup of dressing Swift, this was a high-concept collection which riffed on how clothing turns fabric into sculpture and included an IYKYK reference to Benglis’ 1974 self-portrait Centrefold, in which she is naked and holding a giant dildo. (Because couture is also a shop window for the wardrobes of billionaires, the Centrefold image was blurred out, to avoid offending potential clients.)
View image in fullscreen There was pure glamour on show. Photograph: Kenzo Tribouillard/AFP/Getty Images “I think she’s a genius. She was well before her time – before anyone’s time,” Anderson said of Benglis at a preview. He is upholding his predecessor Maria Grazia Chiuri’s tradition of putting female artists at the centre of the Dior world. His debut couture collection, shown in January, was a celebration of the work of ceramicist Magdalene Odundo.
Anderson’s Dior is razzmatazz but with a sideways bent. His strategy of re-energising the grand house with offbeat creative energy is high-risk, but it is working. In the front row Sabrina Carpenter, in a coquettish ivory lace cocktail dress, sat alongside Josh O’Connor in a deconstructed sheer blazer and sequined cravat.
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