For his sophomore ready-to-wear outing at Dior, Jonathan Anderson let the light in. Rather than pitching the maison’s customary white tent in the Tuileries, he built a giant greenhouse around the garden’s Bassin Octogonal, complete with Dior-branded green park bench seating. Uncannily lifelike artificial flowers floated on the water’s surface, as if they had drifted over from Monet’s famous water lily murals in the Musée de l’Orangerie just beyond. The staging cast the Tuileries’s allées as runways, showing how this lush green space has long been a place where seeing and being seen is a performative act of self-creation for Parisiennes.
Anderson often draws inspiration from literature, and his show notes referenced two works set in the City of Light: “À une passante,” a flaneur’s ode to a beautiful woman, from Charles Baudelaire’s 1857 poetry collection Les Fleurs du Mal—one of the titles recently featured on Anderson’s Dior book totes—and Radclyffe Hall’s pathbreaking 1928 queer romance The Well of Loneliness. The lineup was tighter in focus than Anderson’s ready-to-wear debut, built around two key silhouettes that evoke the masc and femme sensibilities of Stephen Gordon and Mary Llewellyn, the lesbian protagonists of Hall’s novel, who find a fragile freedom in interwar Paris. Peplumed bar jackets layered over flouncy miniskirts conjured Christian Dior’s iconic flower women in a playful, contemporary key, contrasting oversize checked wool suiting and satin-lapel dinner jackets paired with baggy jeans.
Many looks featured a surprise bustle visible only from the rear, the sort of detail that might have caught the eye of a Baudelarian flaneur out for an afternoon stroll. Anderson’s brilliance lies in the way he remixes references with a streak of mischief, folding divergent codes into a single look. Smoking coat dresses and exuberantly ruffled blazers carried a rakish insouciance. Cropped Bar jackets from his menswear returned, puffed up with what looked like petticoats beneath—ready-to-wear quoting menswear, which had itself reworked Dior’s original New Look archetype. Water lilies formed a rhizomatic undercurrent, appearing as oversize brooches with yellow centers and fluttery pink metal petals, as well as in prints and three-dimensional motifs on bags and shoes. Coming from a man with a thing for anthuriums, they felt entirely Anderson while also nodding to Dior’s own love of flowers, from lily of the valley to roses.
