PARIS — The enormous tent constructed in the Place Vauban for Jonathan Anderson’s debut at Dior was printed with a silvery evocation of the past, a monochrome image of Christian Dior’s decorous couture salon.
Fast forward to the present, 75 years later. That tent had been exhaustively climate-controlled to allow for the hanging of two paintings by Jean Siméon Chardin, the 18th century artist who is regarded as the master of the still life. He was a favourite of Dior’s, Anderson’s too. The Chardins were his idea. So was the inspiration for the showspace, clad in velvet like the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin, home to one of the finest collections of European art from the 13th to the 19th century. One Chardin came from the Louvre, the other from the National Gallery of Scotland. Reflect for a moment on the logistics involved in transporting monstrously valuable works of art to a tent packed with an unruly, heatstruck audience for one hour on a Friday afternoon in Paris and you’ll maybe garner some notion of the political and financial power that a fashion conglomerate like LVMH, which owns Dior, now wields. Ah yes, the present.
And the future? Well, for that single stretch of showtime, it rested in Anderson’s hands. He’s been cast as Dior’s saviour in a challenging market — and is the first to oversee women’s, men’s and haute couture collections since Monsieur Dior himself first experimented with menswear. Unsurprisingly, Anderson has been soft-pedalling expectations. “You have to, because no one gives anyone any time anymore,” he conceded at a preview earlier this week. In another exchange, he said, “My idea is to be slightly optimistic, it’s not going to happen overnight. We have to be realistic today.” But his attempt at lowering the temperature was clearly unsuccessful. His audience was littered with pop stars, movie stars and a full platoon of fashion peers, many of whom were on their feet at show’s end.
Anderson was insistent that Dior was something alien to him. “It’s not a character that I know.” But that’s what seduced him. “It’s like buying a chateau in the South of France that you saw on a website, a very British thing to do. It’s beautiful, but it needs so much renovation. You have to start somewhere, and as you go, you realise, ‘Wow! It’s amazing what they did in the 18th century with door handles,’ and then you find the next thing and the next thing.” And those “next things” were the years of input from all the designers who have worked for Dior over the decades. To isolate the most striking carryover from the past in Anderson’s debut collection: Maria Grazia Chiuri’s wildly successful book tote reappears rendered as the covers of specific titles, In Cold Blood, Bonjour Tristesse, and, luridly best of all, Dracula. (“Because it’s Irish,” he said archly.) He compared the learning process to doing a PhD in Dior. What did he come away with? “I feel the name is bigger than the individual designer. It was always like that. So that was the whole idea for me.”
There will undoubtedly be plenty of people who look at what Anderson showed on Friday and question his concept of permanence. “My idea was to decode it to recode it,” he explained, sort of. “That’s how the collection was built.” Take the first look, practically a manifesto in one outfit. “How I feel I’m going to tackle men,” Anderson declared. “Formality, history, the material, Irishness.” The cargo shorts were panniered with the extravagant folds of the Delft dress from 1948, originally carved from 15 metres of duchesse satin, duplicated for today in undyed denim. The jacket featured the classic Bar silhouette, cut here from Donegal tweed. The model sported a formal stock tie. “An English stock,” Anderson explained, “the French is looser. I like the idea of something that makes you lift your head up. There’s an etherealness to the formality.” The shoes were based on the sandals he wore to school in the summer. In other words, a weird but winning fusion which spanned the decades between the Frenchman and the Irishman.
“For me, it’s about a quiet radicalism,” Anderson said. “For the customer, this is already going to be something that is pretty wild, but in my head, it’s normal.” Why is it easy for me to imagine Christian Dior saying something similar 75 years ago? And if my proposed compatibility still seems like a bridge too far, there’s their shared obsession with the 18th century. “I got the guy who’s been sourcing things for me for years to find me the best 18th century menswear, and then we meticulously recreated it. There was no point in changing the fit. When I saw it, I thought, ‘That’s Dior. Let’s just put it up there as a thing.’” Like his own version of Martin Margiela’s “Replications” which he loved so much when he was starting out in fashion. Rebecca Mead’s profile in the New Yorker earlier this year quoted Anderson saying this: “Authenticity is invaluable. Originality is nonexistent. Steal, adapt, borrow. It doesn’t matter where one takes things from. It’s where one takes them to.” So Anderson showed his delicately toned, edibly alluring duplication of the jacket and waistcoat from an aristocrat’s summer day look for the court of Louis XV with a dress shirt, black jeans and unlaced Dior trainers.
Like that first look, it was a provocative encapsulation of the idea of personal style, or how you put things together to express yourself. A midnight blue velvet tail coat over chambray jeans, for instance. Or a delicately frogged white shirt over white jeans. Artistry and calculated artlessness, all of it set to a sensational Frederic Sanchez soundtrack that swung from Springsteen to Little Simz. Velvet, denim, sandals and a stock tie – “I would love to be able to wear that,” Anderson said. “Every time I’ve done a menswear show, I’ve always wanted to be able to do something I would love to be able to pull off. For me this is a fantasy, because it has to be. I find each person in the show equally attractive because I think they embody the ‘thing.’ I believe it, and if I believe it, then I want to dress like it.” Fashion as an act of faith: Anderson mastered that challenge at Loewe, and, if early reactions are any indication, he’ll be able to translate that mastery to Dior.
Finding the future in the past is not a particularly novel concept, but if I think for a moment that everything Anderson has done is almost like a movie, it clarifies how he was able to draw such an extraordinary cast of characters to Loewe and his own brand. One of them, director and frequent collaborator Luca Guadagnino, has been tracking him all week with a film crew. The designer talked about the looks in the show that were pure youthful street as his acknowledgement of Jean-Luc Godard and the nouvelle vague that transformed French cinema and French style, from New Look to New Wave. Anderson said it’s also about him getting used to living in Paris, trying to work out what he loves about the city. “I’m on Île Saint-Louis and there’s something about this idea of tight grey corridors that have light at the end. No matter when you see people, they’re always backlit. And everything looks great backlit. I find it fascinating because it feels like cinema somehow, and really that is how we approached the challenge.”
The city is currently plastered with posters of artist Jean-Michel Basquiat and footballer Kylian Mbappé, the faces of the new Dior man (or, as Anderson says of Mbappé, “a new vision of France”). “I have to find a new language,” Anderson said. “It’s going to take time, and I don’t want to be rushed. Anything is possible. At the end of the day, it’s a job. And you always have to remind yourself that you love the work and you’re gonna get the job done.” Consider this debut a great appetiser for the much more complicated meal to come.