A YEAR on from his womenswear debut at Dior, Jonathan Anderson’s Spring/ Summer 2027 collection feels like the moment his vocabulary for the house begins to crystallise. Shown suspended over the octagonal basin of the Tuileries, beneath a haze of mist and surrounded by trees, it was a collection concerned with one deceptively simple idea: lightness.
Anderson has spent his first year learning how to loosen Dior without losing its identity. Here, tailoring appears to dissolve: pinstripes, Prince of Wales checks and houndstooth are rendered in transparent, weightless fabrics; the Bar jacket is softened and abbreviated; pleated jacquards, organza and mousseline move around the body rather than containing it.
“What is tailoring imagined as flou?” was one of Anderson’s questions for the collection. The answer is clothing that seems almost to leave a trace in the air as it passes.
Nature provides the collection’s emotional and conceptual centre. Anderson’s inspiration began with wénwán walnuts – Chinese walnuts traditionally rotated together in the palm. With years of handling, their surfaces become smooth, richly coloured and highly prized. Two walnuts, presented in a velvet-lined box, were themselves the show invitation – a reminder of time, transformation and the discovery of preciousness in something natural.
That idea of gradual transformation is equally apparent in Anderson’s treatment of the archive. Rather than reproducing Dior’s history, he seems intent on making it move. The architectural grandeur of La Cigale, Christian Dior’s 1952 dress and Anderson’s favourite piece in the archive, is translated into contemporary volume and lightness; houndstooth and checks lose their traditional density; floral references become hand-cut petals. Even the Saddle bag, synonymous with John Galliano’s tenure at Dior, returns. It’s here you can see Anderson’s acknowledgement of what was before stretches further than the founder, as he picks up inspiration from different eras to inform his present.
But this is perhaps Anderson’s emerging Dior code: heritage made fluid, luxury made slightly undone, and femininity allowed to breathe. Sheer dresses, exposed bras, undone zips, metallic trousers (taken from his menswear offering) and whimsical accessories sit beside romantic lace, pastel knits and elegant florals. The result is neither a rejection of Dior nor a nostalgic reconstruction of it, but a process of loosening and rearticulating its famous codes.
There was, however, a poignant presence beneath the show’s ethereality. The collection was dedicated to Mathilde Favier, Dior’s longtime Director of Public Relations, who died in a car accident in France this summer. Favier had been an integral figure at Dior since 2011, and Anderson described her as “the spirit of Couture itself.”
A year into Anderson’s Dior, the collection suggests that his greatest ambition may be not to reinvent the house, but to make its history feel alive again: lighter, stranger, and perpetually in motion.
by Imogen Clark