At Dior, Jonathan Anderson Cultivates a New House of Flowers

Amid the dazzling scrum of stars who stormed the backstage area after Jonathan Anderson’s first haute couture collection for the house of Dior this past January in Paris, Rihanna led the charge with a resounding “Wow! Wow! Wow!” Greta Lee, Anya Taylor-Joy, and various members of the Arnault family lined up to congratulate the designer, who seemed at turns delighted and overwhelmed by the attention, as if he’d rather be outside smoking a cigarette. The Italian film director Luca Guadagnino could be found in his usual place, quietly observing the scene.

“The thing about Jonathan is that he is a great lover of orchids,” Guadagnino said, watching Anderson from the sidelines. “And orchids are not necessarily flowers that show themselves too much at first sight. They can be a very little flower that you don’t really see until much later, so it is not only the concept of the orchid that is beautiful, but also uncovering the secrets behind it.”

Orchids are an apt passion for a newcomer taking on the storied heritage of Christian Dior, the great postwar designer whose love of gardening inspired the house’s nickname, the House of Flowers. They can also be read as an auspicious sign for Anderson, who has reached the pinnacle of fashion at the still youthful age of 41, because orchids tend to have a much longer shelf life than, say, daisies or peonies.

Apart from their ongoing cinematic collaborations—Anderson designed the costumes for Guadagnino’s Challengers and Queer, and the upcoming Artificial, in which Andrew Garfield stars as the OpenAI CEO Sam Altman—Guadagnino has been filming Anderson over the past seven months for a documentary that will chronicle his arrival at Dior during this unusually fraught moment in fashion history. With more than a dozen major labels undergoing creative shake-ups as part of a long overdue luxury-industry reboot, everyone is waiting to see which of the incoming designers will succeed at restoring relevance and desirability to fashion. None of them faces greater scrutiny than Anderson, who, after an 11-year blockbuster run at the Spanish leather goods brand Loewe, takes on Dior as creative director, overseeing the women’s, men’s, and couture collections. It’s a job so big that it was previously held by two people, Maria Grazia Chiuri and Kim Jones. Dior, in fact, had effectively operated as two brands ever since 2000, a distinction that no longer made sense to Anderson. He wanted to author a unified vision for all of Dior, right from the start. “A brand can be in conflict with other brands, but it cannot be conflicted inside itself,” Anderson says. “Plus, this makes it more efficient, you know?”

Anderson’s first men’s and women’s ready-to-wear collections were designed in only about a month each and were well received but seemed cautious about broadcasting real change. Still, they were pored over by online viewers as if Anderson were an oracle of fashion. For men, he offered preppy pastel cable-knit sweaters; Bar jackets in Donegal tweeds; and crisp poplin shirts worn with ties turned inside out and slightly askew, a look inspired by a photograph of Jean-Michel Basquiat. For women, the designs were more daring—the Bar jackets were shrunken, and dresses with bulbous silhouettes drew comparisons to lampshades. It turns out these collections were merely a starting point; couture, for which Anderson allowed himself six months, would be the main event. Judging by the audience’s rapturous reaction to the show, he clearly triumphed.

“This is a historic moment,” said Lee, the scene-stealing actor, who was wearing one of the Paul Poiret–inspired sequined tops from Anderson’s second menswear collection, which had been shown just the week before. “Knowing the ride that it’s taken for him to get here makes it that much deeper to experience, and this was everything that I knew and hoped it would be.” Taylor-Joy and Jennifer Lawrence also wore looks from that men’s show, which was a departure from the first—Poiret’s modernist styles of the 1920s seemed at odds with Dior’s romanticism, and the mash-up felt both provocative and enticing. Mickalene Thomas, the artist whose stunning visual collages happened to be on display at the Grand Palais at that moment, said she was placing a personal order for eight looks from the men’s show. (When it comes to Anderson’s work, almost no one pays attention to gender boundaries—in February, Harry Styles appeared at the Grammys in a custom jacket that closely resembled one from the women’s collection.)

For all the pressure he’s facing, Anderson seems better prepared than anyone to weather the perils of today’s fast-churn industry and its changing rules. At Loewe, he was credited with turning what was once considered a second-tier luxury brand within the LVMH empire into a $1 billion cultural force. Among the cadre of hyper-competitive designers who came to prominence in the 2010s, Anderson went on to become by far the most successful and celebrated—not to mention the most prolific. Even now, he maintains his signature JW Anderson brand and collaborates with Uniqlo, in addition to working on film projects and curating exhibitions.

Despite Anderson’s meteoric rise, the Dior gig was a big leap. The brand is revered as one of the most important in the world, and its revenue is about 10 times that of Loewe’s. Anderson had previously dismissed couture—the rarefied, centuries-old tradition of handsewn, made-to-measure clothes that nowadays come with six-figure price tags—as irrelevant in the digital age. Less than a dozen houses still have the means to support a couture atelier in Paris, and only one other, Chanel, does so on the same large scale as Dior.

“If you had asked me a couple of years ago, I would have been like, ‘Ugh, what is this for?’ ” says Anderson the day after his couture show. “It wasn’t until I was in the couture atelier, where everything is silent because there are no machines, that I realized that this thing that continues to this day, at the same level of craft, will just disappear if Dior doesn’t do it or Chanel doesn’t do it. It was in that minute that I realized that designing couture is like protecting an endangered craft. That’s how I got my head around it.”

Anderson is speaking at his show’s venue, an enormous mirrored tent erected in the gardens of the Musée Rodin, which had been transformed overnight into a public exhibition space. Several of Anderson’s couture designs are displayed alongside the voluptuous ceramics by the artist Magdalene Odundo that inspired them. Anderson looks fresh and is remarkably focused, speaking with an efficiency that he says is a result of the “tunnel vision” it has taken to get to this point. “I must admit, it’s the first time I feel like, Okay, bit by bit, people are going to warm up to this,” he says. For the remainder of the week, fans would line up outside the tent, in the rain and cold, for a chance to see his designs in person. These included one of the opening dresses, made of breathtaking plissé silk georgette teased into an exaggerated hourglass silhouette, and headpieces crafted of hand-painted silk crepe that had been painstakingly cut into the shapes of petals to resemble bouquets of cyclamen.

The exhibition was intended to “demystify the world of couture” and inspire young designers, Anderson says, but it also served to reinforce a narrative of respect that he has been spelling out through even the tiniest of details at Dior. Ever since his childhood in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, and throughout his brief foray as an actor in America at age 19 and his early years designing in London, Anderson has viewed himself as something of an underdog. His ambition and good looks are attributable to his father, Willie Anderson, a former captain of Ireland’s rugby team. His love of history and his big-picture mindset likely owe more to his maternal grandfather, James Buckley, who worked for a linen weaver that produced fabrics used all over England. Anderson believes that all clothing tells a story, so he wove into his couture debut cuffs and rings crafted with fragments of meteorites, and brooches that contained miniature artworks by Rosalba Carriera and John Smart—“artifacts and materials that carry memory, utility, or prior meaning,” as he described them.

When he arrived at Dior, Anderson knew he would be compared to those who came before him; he responded by making previous Dior designers part of his story. He opened his first women’s ready-to-wear show last October with a short video by Adam Curtis that spliced scenes from horror films with footage of Dior shows by Chiuri, Raf Simons, and John Galliano, as well as Christian Dior himself, Yves Saint Laurent, Gianfranco Ferré, and Marc Bohan, who helmed the label for nearly 30 years prior to its modern reinvention during the luxury boom. Anderson’s point was that the brand’s heritage is not Christian Dior’s alone, and so he has every right to make it his own. That was evident in skirts structured to plow forward like cowcatchers; plissé and lace effects that gave lightness to utilitarian chinos and loose trousers; and satin lapels, like those of a tuxedo, on almost every jacket.

Days before that ready-to-wear show last October, Anderson had invited Galliano to preview the collection. Galliano brought a bag of treats from a Tesco supermarket for him and the atelier, and a small bouquet of cyclamen. This became the germ of Anderson’s couture show. He sent cyclamen bouquets as invitations to guests, and the ceiling of the venue at the Musée Rodin was covered in a carpet of natural moss and artificial cyclamen—also a nod to Simons’s own Dior couture debut, for which entire rooms were covered in masses of flowers.

Of all the special guests sitting in the front row, Galliano drew the most notice as he visibly reacted to Anderson’s designs. “You can’t avoid the past and who has been here,” Anderson says. “In university, I was obsessed with Galliano, and I am still to this day.” Anderson’s approach inside the atelier has been shrewd as well: He defers to the mastery of skilled craftsmen and tailors who have been at Dior for decades. “I sometimes like getting told off when I’m doing something wrong, like when I picked up a garment the wrong way, not by the hanger, or when I was looking for a lint roller, but in couture you would never use a lint roller because it actually puts glue onto the fabric,” he says.

Anderson has already restored a sense of optimism to the house, and that mood is beginning to translate to the stores, where the designer says his priority has been to inject color and motion, particularly with accessories. His petal pink Bow bags and whimsical Dior book totes—rendered as famous book covers, with In Cold Blood and Dracula editions in the first men’s show—have been early hits. One of Anderson’s smartest moves was to introduce more handbags and accessories to couture, with one-of-a-kind minaudières made of 18th-century silks; a lacquered ladybug; a clasped purse trailing ribbons of green raffia; and molded versions of the classic Lady Dior bag that seem likely to be translated into ready-to-wear iterations in the future. With prices starting in the five figures for the couture bags, Anderson has created a new trophy for the ultrarich—couture that can be worn every day. “For me, it was about the total look, the total volume of the outfit,” he says. “And how do I add my own chapter to something? I tried to carve out a tiny bit that is new.”

Those close to Anderson sense a shift in his persona as well. The designer has long wrestled with fashion’s place in a changing society. “When he got this job, I was chatting with him in his kitchen about how intimidating it was to take over the house,” says Justin Vivian Bond, the multifaceted performer who has worn Anderson’s creations for Loewe, and now Dior, onstage. “He’s looking at this as a gift. He’s got such an amazing history to draw on to create something new for Dior that makes it magic. That has given him freedom.”

Couture represents the sum of Anderson’s life in fashion, Guadagnino adds, citing the designer’s obsession with craftsmanship and, again, his love of blooms. Anderson recalls visiting a greenhouse full of orchids as a child and says he has been fascinated by their beauty ever since. “They’re such magical things, because they kind of look fake,” he says. In fact, several of his couture dresses were decorated at the neckline with strings of trompe l’oeil orchids that were actually made of other materials.

What Anderson wants is for people to use their eyes, to start looking at things for what they really are, and to question them. That’s why he opened the couture collection to the public in Paris, why he blurs the distinctions between the natural and the artificial throughout his work, and, ultimately, why he wanted the job at Dior. Arriving each morning to encounter a throng of 200 or more tourists waiting to visit La Galerie Dior, the house museum that opened in 2022 in the same building as Dior’s headquarters on the Avenue Montaigne, he is reminded of the enormous responsibility on his shoulders.

“Everyone hates change, but we can’t control anything anymore,” he says. “We have phones that control us. It’s sort of like the arts get trapped in this doom cycle where people are afraid to create things.” Online barbs tend to haunt Anderson, who is surprised that people who have never seen couture in person ignore the craft behind it, or forget that he’s a real person who, like an orchid, is not invulnerable. He could go on, but Anderson, now that he is at Dior, is quick to brush aside any whiff of cynicism. He wants to open the doors widely and allow in some fresh air.

“The role of the designer, in any form, is to show something that people didn’t know they wanted, or something for them to react to,” he says. “And if that means trying to work out a solution or trying to engage with audiences in a different way, then that feels really important. It helps me love what I do.”

Hair by Guido; makeup by Yadim for Dior Beauty at Art Partner; manicure by Ama Quashie. Set design by Poppy Bartlett at the Magnet Agency. Movement direction by MJ Harper at Concrete Rep. Models: Jules, Lily McMenamy at Next; Charlie Jones at Ford Models. Casting by Ashley Brokaw Casting.

Produced by Erin Fee Productions; Fashion Assistants: Natasha Arnold, Shaun Kong, Marine Boisset, Pauline Collet, Winnie Rielly; Colorist: Joana Neves; Makeup Assistants: Aimi Osada, Iona Moura, Joel Babicci; Set Assistants: Dominika Opalena, Elli Binnie; Manicure Assistant: Aston McMaster; Retouching: SKN Lab.