At Dior Jonathan Anderson Proved Why He's The Man For The Job

Forbes

a day ago

Dior, Jonathan Anderson, Summer 2026
New Dior creative director Jonathan Anderson is not only a fashion designer, he's a genius marketeer who can take an abstract concept and distill it down into simple ideas that instantly communicate the essence of a hundred social whispering campaigns before you can say artificial intelligence.
Let's take holy grail, 'contemporary heritage or, 'reconstructed formality' and 'a play on history and affluence, decoding the language of the House in order to recode it' as it was described in the show notes.
But while you've got couture silhouettes reimagined as cargo shorts and, on the flip side, the Dior Bar Jacket given the tuxedo treatment, it was his treatment of the tie that summed everything up.
Dior, Jonathan Anderson, Summer 2026
The tie is the foundation of Jonathan Anderson's Dior
It started even in the run-up to the Paris Fashion Week show with both said tie and the new more relaxed gesture of knotting it being teased via video by French soccer champion and house ambassador Kylian Mbappé.
On the runway itself, it segued from turtleneck-collar-hybrid (evoking that archetypal creative industry titan look favored by Steve Jobs to Anderson's new boss Bernard Arnault), through trompe l'oeil tone-on-tone atop-popped collar to inside out so the interior Dior logo label became a feature in its own right.
Jonathan Anderson has claimed a basic menswear staple and made it so emblematic of his new Dior that whenever it features within the output of any other brand from luxury to high street (for the next season at least and maybe longer), it will be measured against 'the original' as a Dior dupe, homage or a reference.
Dior, Jonathan Anderson, Summer 2026
Jonathan Anderson's Dior was 'surreal-lite'
While Dior is not a house where Loewe level surrealism would necessarily sit comfortably, Anderson still found ways to inject some 'surreal-lite' touches (surrealism for the age of Ozempic) via literal interpretations of Maria Grazia Chiuri's successful Dior Book Totes where the bags were decked out in the covers of titles like Françoise Sagan's Bonjour Tristesse and Baudelaire's Les Fleurs Du Mal.
Bonjour Tristress Dior Book Tote on the runway.
Elsewhere bags came dressed in multiple tassels resembling skeins of wool echoing the Dior collection's peppy collegiate style knits and the Dior house's roots in craftsmanship.
Tassels ressembling skeins of wool bedecked bags on the Dior runway.
World building at Dior
Ceramic plates were sent out with the show invitations. However, these weren't just a nice touch playing to Anderson's love of ceramics evinced both by his personal collection (Lucie Rie, Lynda Benglis, Hans Coper and John War) and ready-to-wear collaborations and capsules throughout his decade odd tenure at Loewe.
It was, arguably, a considered step towards building out awareness of DiorMaison, Dior's homeware collection, and elevating the desirability of the category among its 'fashion' audience.
Lest there be any doubt, refer to Instagram for further details where said plate (a reissue of an archival object form 1975) appeared as part of an aspirational breakfast set-up in a joint Dior / DiorMaison post.
Launched in 2016, and given it's own Instagram handle in 2020, homeware is evidently a space that has been identified as a growth opportunity for Dior.
Dior, Jonathan Anderson, Summer 2026