PARIS (AP) — No different present up to now at Paris Vogue Week has drawn such a feverish crush of celebrities, designers and press.
All eyes have been on Jonathan Anderson — the Northern Irish designer who has already reworked Loewe into a worldwide powerhouse of wit and craft — as he unveiled his first Dior womenswear assortment on Wednesday.
The burden of historical past was in every single place. Dior was the style home that recrowned Paris because the world’s capital of vogue in 1947, when Christian Dior unveiled the “New Look.” That Bar jacket and wasp-waisted silhouette made headlines throughout a world nonetheless rising from warfare. Each Dior designer since — from Yves Saint Laurent to John Galliano, Raf Simons and Maria Grazia Chiuri — has been judged by how they wrestle with that legacy.
Anderson, 41, is the primary in Dior’s historical past to supervise each males’s and girls’s strains, a accountability with huge cultural and industrial stakes.
All eyes on Anderson
The staging dramatized the second. An enormous inverted pyramid, echoing the Louvre, loomed over the runway as a montage of Dior’s imagery flickered throughout it at breakneck velocity — a horror filmlike splice of icons and ghosts. The message: the burden of heritage, fractured and unsettled.
What adopted was not a revolution however a collection of probing gestures. Anderson has by no means been one to detonate home codes; at Loewe, and once more in his Dior males’s debut in June, his methodology has been to bend and reframe. That intuition carried by way of right here. Silhouettes slouched, virtually defiantly unfastened. Admiral visors capped the forehead. Black lace flared like bows — or bats — from the again. Most placing was the recurring “double balloon” kind hidden below skirts, producing an odd, bouncing, Versailles-like silhouette — a sly riff on 18th-century panniers made uncanny for the current.
Icons revisited, however no ‘New Look’ second
The Bar jacket — the staple of Dior’s revolutionary New Look — was reimagined off-kilter, its peplum hoisted towards the bust, the hourglass skewed into one thing surreal. On the physique, it generally appeared ill-fitting, as if the poetry of the concept fought towards proportion.
The consequence echoed his menswear: not a “New Look” with a capital N — as one critic put it — however a constellation of eclectic concepts. Critics who wished a single, defining jolt — a Slimane-style bolt of readability or a Simons-like manifesto — can have left underwhelmed. As a substitute, Anderson’s Dior unfolded like his opening montage: fragmentary and intentionally unresolved.
There have been plain wins. The standard of the garments’ materials, end and exact craft strengthened Dior’s atelier energy. Historic references felt alive, not embalmed. And there was industrial oxygen in separates, ballooned skirts, equipment with chunk.
But drawbacks lingered. The Hitchcockian menace of the opening movie was by no means absolutely matched on the runway. The celeb crush risked overshadowing the message. And the absence of 1 commanding silhouette means Anderson’s Dior stays, for now, a piece in progress.
Adjustments afoot
Nonetheless, the magnitude of this debut can’t be overstated. Anderson is a part of a uncommon season of firsts: Matthieu Blazy’s first Chanel assortment arrives subsequent week, Pierpaolo Piccioli unveils his debut at Balenciaga on Oct. 4, and Demna has simply made his Gucci debut in Milan through a Spike Jonze–directed movie occasion. Collectively, they kind a reshuffle that’s rewriting the posh map.
Wednesday was much less coronation than prologue: understated in tone, radical intimately, the present signaled the start of many attainable paths.
