Dior turns up springtime-in-Paris for Anderson’s second womenswear show
Northern Irish designer ditches darker undercurrents for seductive vision of Monet’s waterlilies at opening show of Paris fashion week
In a dark news cycle, joy sells. With his second major womenswear show for Dior, the Northern Irish designer Jonathan Anderson put a pin in the soul-searching of his first season and plunged gleefully for the springtime-in-Paris jugular. For the opening show of Paris fashion week, Dior offered a seductive vision of Monet’s waterlilies, walks in the Tuileries gardens, and the Eiffel Tower glittering in the sunshine.
Anderson, a keen art collector who moved to Paris for the Dior role last year, has been looking at Seurat’s romantic paintings of ordinary Parisians at leisure, as well as Monet. A promenade across the octagonal pond of the Tuileries was built as a catwalk, and the Sunday sailboats upgraded for the occasion into giant lily pads with vibrant blooms. Dollhouse-sized pairs of classic French green park chairs were sent out as whimsical invitations.
Under an obligingly blue sky, the buoyant mood of this show was very different from Anderson’s debut six months ago, where an Adam Curtis film splicing horror cinema with archive clips from the Dior archive opened proceedings, and faces were shadowed under darkly beaked Tricorn hats.
“That show was done in 26 days,” recalled Anderson, adding that he felt “a lot more calm” this time around. “Last year was so intense. Dior has this giant past, and I had to start there, but now I feel free to release it from that.” Last season, he was in his own head, now he is looking ahead. “This feels like where I want this thing to go.”
Strong and pretty are often treated as opposites in fashion, but this collection achieved sunniness and sophistication. Bar jackets exploded into chiffon waves at the waist, each layer edged with beads so that they rippled and caught the light like water. Frothy dresses had a cottontail bounce, shoes had polka dots or porcelain flowers. The skill of the Dior atelier – a highly skilled workforce which has recently doubled in size, a sign of the scale of LVMH’s ambition for this brand – was flexed in the tiny pointillist paillettes on an exuberant layered skirt, and the shearling coat ironed to look like Astrakhan lamb fur that closed the show.
Anderson’s taste for subversion does not allow for too much sugar. There were lots of trousers, slouched to hang like tracksuit bottoms but with sportswear’s go-faster side stripes replaced with a hip-to-ankle line of tiny covered buttons, which the designer described as “high-low, in a good way” at a preview before the show. He named his favourite piece as a simple wine-dark cashmere and mohair coat with black satin shawl collar, which he said was “masculine, but sexual. People know Dior for dresses, but he made some of the greatest coats of all time.”