Designer spins the historic house off on a tangent in Paris, with his reading of its history being that shock value can sell
F
or billionaires with an eye on best-dressed lists and Oscar nominees with sights set on red carpet domination, Paris haute couture – where a dress can take months to make by hand, and cost as much as a small apartment in the city – is a shopping opportunity. For the rest of the fashion industry, it is a battle for bragging rights between the haughtiest brand names in the world. With ambitious young designers newly installed at Dior and Chanel vying for domination, that battle is feistier than ever.
Haute couture is an arms race like no other. At 10 o’clock on a Monday morning, the Oscar nominee Teyana Taylor was in a diamond tiara in the front row of Schiaparelli, where the house is preparing for a lavish exhibition opening at the V&A Museum this spring. A few hours later in the garden of the Rodin Museum, where a mirrored Dior catwalk reflected a suspended canopy of lush moss studded with silk flowers, Pharrell Williams and the actor Josh O’Connor arrived promptly, but the show was delayed an hour for the arrival of Rihanna in a black satin cocoon coat.
Jonathan Anderson, the 41-year-old Northern Irish designer who took over as creative director last year, is spinning the historic house of Dior off on a tangent. For this first haute couture show, the hourglass silhouette of Christian Dior’s 1947 New Look became a silk georgette cocktail dress with pleats that twisted around the body like clay thrown on a pottery wheel. The shape, inspired by the work of the Kenyan-born British ceramicist Dame Magdalene Odundo, brought an urgent, kinetic energy to Dior’s classic curves. Meanwhile, the charming floral motifs adored by Monsieur Dior, a devoted gardener, became snowball-sized earmuffs of cyclamen, inspired by a bouquet which John Galliano, one of Anderson’s predecessors in the Dior job, brought as a gift when he visited the atelier last year.
