Loose Threads
Have you seen the new Haider Ackermann show for Tom Ford? The still photos don’t do the clothes justice — watch the video (you may want to mute it because the brand put a terrible soundtrack on it). So many designers seem to be leaning into oddities and gimmicks but this felt like an old-school showcase of just great clothes.
Speaking of shows that were about the clothes instead of, like, endless Instagrams of invitations and whatever else: check out Lanvin and Dries Van Noten.
The RoseSkinCo. markdowns of its permanent hair removal devices continue. The rose gold one is a rather attractive design.
Coperni is introducing athleisure that, The Business of Fashion reports, is “infused with probiotics and prebiotics meant to transfer from fabric to skin.” This is part of the ongoing trend of companies trying sell products that purport to take the effort out of wellness routines. Guess what Coperni is calling this stuff? Careware.
A couple of models in the Rabanne show wore sunglasses that looked like snorkel masks. Rabanne has a slow-motion video of them on its site and it’s just *chef’s kiss*.
On that note, let’s talk Dior…
Jonathan Anderson’s Strange Dior Debut
Well, it happened. Jonathan Anderson showed his first Dior women’s collection.
His journey to this point has been long. Some — particularly those who hated his predecessor Maria Grazia Chiuri’s collections — might say arduous. It started in earnest, arguably, in 2013, when he took over Loewe as creative director, making the label an “It” brand synonymous with an heirloom tomato that someone declared in a tweet to be “so Loewe.” Anderson — quirky guy that he is — responded by making a purse that resembled that very tomato. Before that, he founded his namesake line JW Anderson, which started with menswear in 2008 and moved into women’s in 2010. That brand became synonymous with a pigeon purse.
The rumors about Anderson going to Dior started in 2024. Oh, how the internet loved those! The idea that Chiuri, whose commercial collections had become increasingly colorless and predictable over the course of her nearly decade-long tenure at Dior, could be replaced by someone so whimsical and online was just delicious.
And so Anderson’s appointment and her ouster were formally announced around four months ago. We saw his menswear in July, and now the women’s collection has been unleashed like bursts of rainbow smoke at Becca Bloom’s wedding.
So, after all that hope (all that hype!) have his designs been the salve that haters of Chiuri’s clothes have been longing for for years? The sweet relief from her beige Roman-inspired gowns and insistence that all of it was a feminist statement? First, the internet seemingly chased Virginie Viard out of Chanel, and then after enough complaining, Chiuri was out, too. So now that Anderson’s in there like the people wanted, is fashion forever changed? Is everyone happy now?
Well, not really.
Then again!
Like Dario Vitale’s debut collection for Versace, Anderson’s Dior rebrand has been pretty polarizing.
This was to be expected after we got a preview of his vision for women’s Dior via red carpet dresses on a few actresses in recent months. A fiery disdain emerged online for some of the looks. There was Alba Rohrwacher at the Venice Film Festival, in a navy gown that sort of made her look like she had an ottoman attached to her butt. Then there was Anya Taylor-Joy in the ice blue dress with the sculptural woven hem at the Toronto International Film Festival, about which people had feelings.
Well, those feelings be damned, that same dress made three more appearances in Wednesday’s show — in black, beige, and gray. (Gray evening wear is becoming a surprisingly big trend this season.)
I’d argue Anderson’s debut women’s show was uneven. There were some strong looks. Whenever Anderson does something shrunken, people like it, maybe because it looks cute and different in a moment when so many clothes are oversized. Like the bar jackets that carried over from his July men’s show with contrasting black lapels, which he paired with pleated mini skirts. The mini skirts with the waist bows and floral prints — some fuzzy, some stuffed — also felt twee and different. The sculptural opening dress was, depending on how you feel about bows, inoffensive — arguably elegant, definitely quirky. I loved the tan suede hooded poncho coat toward the end. And I was relieved that, unlike many designers these days, he didn’t just go look at a bunch of eighties stuff and try to recreate it. (I should note that ALL of these looks would have been much more interesting if he showcased their beauty on a diverse body types.)
There was also a lot of mid — the dresses toward the end with contrasting black ribbons that looked like they got drunk in the Chanel showroom and wandered off down the wrong runway. The plain, slim sweatpants that look like the stuff older rich ladies would thoughtlessly spend $3,300 on (a real price!) so they have something comfortable to wear on planes. They just seemed out of place in a runway show that had so many oddities in it. Looking at them felt like going to the zoo and finding enclosures filled with house cats and squirrels instead of lions and tigers.
And then, there were some unappealing ideas. The sheer lace black dress with angular sleeves and cutouts over the armpits (do people want to to show off their armpits?!). The knit capes didn’t look terribly special to me (maybe those were more stately, rich-woman plane-wear?). And I don’t even want to think about what Dior is going to charge for the denim mini skirts with the frayed hems that look like they could come from any store in the mall. But among the strangest looks were the dresses with the bulbous, sculptured draping in front which looked — particularly in videos — downright testicular.
All that said, Anderson did two really smart things leading up to this debut. The first was to suggest that we probably wouldn’t like his first shows all that much. Before his men’s show, he told Women’s Wear Daily, “You cannot rebuild a house in one show. It’s impossible. You’d have to be like Christ.” He added that he’d need five collections to “break the cycle” and fully establish his vision. (This is also surely a useful message to impart to his sales-hungry corporate overlords at LVMH.)
The second smart thing he did was to load the whole thing up with pretension. People eat that stuff up. There was the invitation — a porcelain plate affixed with porcelain nuts (I may be sensing a theme here…). There was the viral video of him explaining the new logo, which now has three lowercase letters and a slightly different font. There were the show notes which read, according to Diana Tsui:
Daring to enter the house of Dior requires an empathy with its history, a willingness to decode its language, which is part of the collective imagination, and the resoluteness to put all of it in a box. Not to erase it, but to store it, looking ahead, coming back to bits, traces or entire silhouettes from time to time, like revisiting memories. It’s an ever-evolving sentiment and task that is both complex and instinctive.
Okay, sure!
And let’s not forget the whole intro that people feverishly filmed for social media, featuring a video by documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis that Vogue reported was “screened on a giant inverted pyramid” and “intercut horror movie clips… with high-speed flashes of footage of all the designers who’ve preceded Anderson: Yves Saint Laurent, Marc Bohan, Gianfranco Ferré, John Galliano, Raf Simons, Kris Van Assche, Kim Jones and Maria Grazia Chiuri.” I’ll hand it to Anderson — honoring his predecessors was a class act.
I kicked off a thread in the Back Row chat to get a temperature read from you all about the show — and the reaction there is mixed, but hopeful.
What did you think of Anderson’s debut? Drop your thoughts in the comments!
