If the trio of long, pleated swirls of fabric in black, white, and burnt orange that opened Jonathan Anderson’s debut haute couture show at Dior on January 26 felt familiar, that’s because they are. One was teased yesterday in a cryptic black-and-white Hiroshi Sugimoto photograph titled Stylized Sculpture 154 on the French house’s Instagram account. Scrolling back further, these pieces are related to the bell-shaped mini dress that opened Anderson’s Dior ready-to-wear debut this past October (a more distant cousin is the vertically pleated, basque-waist Dior gown Jennifer Lawrence wore to the Governors Awards the next month). Anderson treats all his work as part of a single creative ecosystem, approaching couture as a laboratory of ideas created on a six-month lead time while he simultaneously develops shorter-term projects, from ready-to-wear and menswear runway shows to pre-collections and red-carpet commissions. Ideas tested on his couture bench during this period can surface elsewhere before their formal debut.
Both versions of the swirled dress take their cues from the boldly curvaceous forms of ceramicist Magdalene Odundo’s burnished black and burnt-orange clay vessels, though the silhouettes only bear a surface resemblance. The couture pieces achieve their three-dimensionality through delicate lines of pleated tulle, each painstakingly stitched onto an internal framework to create volumes that even the most precise machine-sewn garments can only hint at. Anderson’s fascination with the architecture of fashion has deep roots. During his time at Loewe, he inaugurated the Loewe Craft Prize to support global artisans and, in 2017, curated the Disobedient Bodies exhibition at the Hepworth Wakefield museum. The show placed figurative sculptures by artists including Odundo, Barbara Hepworth, and Louise Bourgeois in conversation with sculptural fashion from designers ranging from Christian Dior to Rei Kawakubo.
Anderson later collaborated with Odundo on a hand-knitted blanket capsule for his JW Anderson label in 2021, transforming her sinuous contours into pieces one could literally wrap around oneself. His confident first couture collection hints at a vision that expands the language of Dior couture, questioning long-held assumptions about materiality. Bar jackets feature supple draping, shredded chiffon and organza are layered like feathers, and wasp-waist Winged dresses are reimagined as flounced sweater dresses loosely cinched with black bows.
Accessories, here, carry new weight. Sculptural heels and minaudières are wrapped in re-embroidered antique 18th-century French textiles, while a jewelry range reanimates 18th-century portrait miniatures by Rosalba Carriera and John Smart as brooches framed by pearls, bows, and hand-painted orchids. Chunky cuffs and rings set with otherworldly fossilized ammonites and meteorite fragments push the offering further into the realm of the tactile and the talismanic.
“When you copy nature, you always learn something,” read the show notes. “Nature offers no fixed conclusions, only systems in motion—evolving, adapting, enduring. Haute couture belongs to this same logic.... It is also a way of seeing—an interpretive lens through which the present is examined, reassembled and imagined anew. Urgent. Subtle. Precise.”
