“It’s great because it was a menswear piece first and foremost,” Cullen said of Anderson’s approach. The jacket first appeared during the men’s show in Donegal tweed, a nod to Anderson’s own Irish heritage. In form, it remained loyal. “From a pattern-cutting perspective, it was very close to the original Bar jacket,” she noted. “No vents at the back. The silhouette was still there.” But materially and contextually, it was destabilised – and miniaturised, in the case of the version produced for Rihanna and A$AP Rocky’s son, Riot. Dior’s codes, the collection suggested, are not set messages to be broadcast but structures to be worked on. Or, as Cullen puts it, prompts for “taking a hallowed garment and mashing it up”.
That attitude extended into the womenswear. Instead of reproducing familiar silhouettes, Anderson isolated specific formal gestures and exaggerated or rebalanced them. Here, the Bar jacket was shrunken to baby-doll proportions: a little pleated mini skirt, the jacket (again in Donegal tweed) cropped so that the hem flared out high above the hips. Where Maria Grazia Chiuri’s reworking of the Bar jacket had relied on softness and symbolic pairing, most famously with the “We Should All Be Feminists” T-shirt, Anderson’s intervention was more architectural. The difference was not simply one of mood, but of method: a jacket asked to speak, versus one asked to change shape.
Fashion today is deeply preoccupied with its own past. In an era of risk aversion and brand consolidation, the archive offers a safe commercial resource, a storehouse of pre-approved shapes and signifiers that come with built-in recognition. As with film, IP is tremendously valuable. Referencing, in this context, functions less as inquiry than as reassurance. What makes Anderson compelling, even when individual ideas do not quite land, is that his engagement with history resists that logic. His work is driven by bricolage. References collide and overlap, functioning like hyperlinks that encourage the viewer to double back and dig deeper. The results can be uneven, but they rarely feel inert.
“To mix numerous references within the first collection was clever,” Cullen observes. “It wasn’t, ‘Here is the silhouette, this is the easy story of the show.’ It was disruptive – your eye was moving around, thinking: how does that relate to that?” The Delft ball gown, having first cued a series of men’s shorts, with loops and layers of fabric crisp as the folds of a Viennetta, now inspired a set of equally intricate skirts – but the fabric was tough to the point of utility. The tourbillon dress was elongated and amplified. Elsewhere, Cullen pointed to the two-tiered skirts of the Corolla line, the draped knots of the H-line, and the wired protrusions that gave a subtle nod to the Profile Line.
Silhouette here is not particularly harmonious. Dior’s original project, after all, was born of contradiction. The New Look promised glamour after deprivation, but it also reinstated discipline – a tightly managed vision of the body at a moment when Europe was desperate for renewal. “Everyone was desperate for something new, to turn the page and look away from what had gone on before,” Cullen said. In the late 1940s, rigidity could be read as hopeful, a way of asserting order and abundance after collapse, and insisting that the future was ready to be shaped anew.
The present moment is less assured. “Today, sadly, we’re at the other end,” Cullen continues. “Maybe we’re heading into something as opposed to coming out of it.” Perhaps Anderson’s silhouettes register that unease. His womenswear does not smooth the body into an idealised outline but presses against it. Lace dresses end in hard metal edges. Volumes oscillate between softness and resistance, occasionally to the point of being unflattering.
That tension sharpens when it comes to femininity. Post-war elegance is often glibly framed as liberation. Equally, it was a return to ornament and display, a reassertion of control over how the female body should appear and behave. Femininity at Dior has always carried that tension, even when presented as timeless or universal. At LOEWE, which began life as a leather goods company, Anderson had little obligation to address this history, but at Dior it is inbuilt. His response has been neither rejection nor affirmation. Familiar codes surface and are subtly unsettled. Rugby shirts appear alongside frilled skirts. The language of femininity is present, but rarely permitted to settle into nostalgia or reassurance.
All of this takes place within clearly understood limits. “The bottom line is the customer,” Cullen notes, returning repeatedly to the realities of scale and expectation. Dior, as LVMH’s flagship, cannot afford unmediated radicalism. Anderson understands this. The runway absorbs the risk, while other channels – advertising, in-store stock – move more cautiously. Innovation travels at different speeds, calibrated across different audiences and contexts.
Dior’s legacy, across all of its creative directors, has never been static. Instead, its history is built from a series of provisional experiments, each shaped by its moment. Anderson’s collection recognises that restlessness and adapts it to a new historical condition, one defined less by recovery than by uneasy anticipation – and an adept understanding of today’s luxury landscape. There is devotion to the way Anderson handles Dior’s past, but also distraction: a contemporary reading of history in which the ideas ricochet in all directions. .
