A SMALL black disco ball. That was the invite: minimal, mischievous and entirely on-theme. It arrived, setting the tone before a single look had been seen, and Jonathan Anderson delivered on every promise it made.
Anderson presented his third menswear collection for Dior on Wednesday morning inside the gilded rooms of the Musée Nissim de Camondo, a 19th-century Parisian mansion currently closed to the public for restoration, its undone grandeur a perfect mirror for the collection itself. The show, originally scheduled for 2:30pm, was moved to 9am after a heatwave gripped the city. Guests arrived to cold towels, strawberries and parasols, a fittingly theatrical prelude to what unfolded inside.
It began with a single model plugging his phone into an aux cable. The gesture, domestic, irreverent and charged, said everything. The soundtrack that followed was created exclusively for the show by British producer Fred Again, whose propulsive emotionally-textured compositions drove the energy of the room from soirée to something far more untamed. In the front row, BTS’s Jimin, a longstanding Dior ambassador, sat alongside actors LaKeith Stanfield, Mike Faist and Drew Starkey, the assembled audience as carefully curated as the collection itself.
Anderson’s guiding concept was seductive in its simplicity: a soirée turning into a house party. The collection opened with 66 looks of deconstructed tailoring: sheer pinstripe chiffon suits, their construction deliberately undone and rebuilt, paired with loose satin bow ties and shirts worn casually open at the chest. A sober palette of black, grey and camel grounded the first half before the collection accelerated into something altogether more electric.
Then came the turn. Sequinned trousers in gold and silver, glitter-encrusted denim, hand-embroidered metallic disco-ball loafers and sharp bursts of pink, yellow and cobalt injected the full energy of a proper after-party. Running throughout were the house’s archival signatures: frockcoats with Napoleonic embellishments, tweed Bar jackets, and trompe l’oeil scarves drawn from a 1979 haute couture collection, each grounding the spectacle in something deeply and unmistakably Dior.
Anderson continues to prove himself a master of elegant disruption, making the familiar feel thrillingly and irreversibly strange.
by Ellis Dowle