A couple of years ago, the hugely successful and very upwardly mobile fashion designer from Northern Ireland, Jonathan Anderson, was the creative director of the luxury French fashion house, Loewe (as well as proprietor of his own brand, JW Anderson). Fast-forward 24 months and he has moved on. Now the 41-year-old has taken over at Dior; the first man since Christian Dior himself to have charge of the whole shebang. And Dior died as long ago as 1957.
The photo on the home page shows the long-pleated dresses featured in Anderson’s first couture collection for Dior as exhibited in Paris at the end of last month, modelled (pun intended) on the shape of the vases created by a British ceramics’ designer. “My Dior is never going to be a formula,” said Anderson. “My brain doesn’t work like that. I get bored too quickly. [Christian Dior] changed fashion in 10 years. The shows he did, we look at them now as classicism, but at the time people were quite confused by them.” The 10 years he speaks of was the decade between the first haute-couture extravaganza of the house’s founder in 1947 and his death.
Among those looking on in Paris, no doubt admiringly, were John Galliano, who had been a chief designer at Dior until he departed in inauspicious circumstances in 2011 – sacked for allegedly making racist and anti-semitic comments in the course of a drunken rant. Also watching at the Musée Rodin were Jeff Bezos and his wife Lauren Sanchez, who I’m guessing would have been delighted at the set-up of the hall which created the effect of a giant box of mirrors. Anderson reiterated that he’s “not about just one note, like ‘this is the Dior look’. For me it’s about ideas, and ideas that can make money”. Among these ideas are accessories, such as handbags manufactured from the fragments of meteorites.
The guy covering the show for the Financial Times wrote that Anderson had asked himself the question: ‘How do you dress a new aristocracy?’ As to the impact provided by his answers, he suggested “for those questioning the influence of [Anderson’s] bold propositions, you need only count how many guys under 30 you see wearing neckties skew-whiff, folded over and tossed back. That can be traced pretty much single-handedly back to Anderson’s debut Dior menswear last June”.
Personally, I’m prepared to take his word for it.