“The more you love the brand, the more it will give you back.” That was the line Anderson heard last year when he asked John Galliano to meet him and his first ever collection for the Christian Dior label. For Galliano, the designer who stayed by the side of the brand for more years than Christian Dior himself, some would’ve expected a grand speech or a cryptic fashion prophecy, but luckily, he arrived at the office with a bag of Tesco sweets and a modest bunch of cyclamen, tied neatly with black silk ribbons. “I took this as a starting point so that everyone could receive the same posy of flowers I had received,” Anderson shared on his Instagram, just a few days before the show.
If you’re launching a couture era, flowers with a backstory, plus a Galliano cameo, are a pretty solid place to start. And as it seems, it’s the move to finally make Galliano attend a Dior show too. It had been over a decade since he had been part of any Dior runway moment, the man was last tied to the house back in 2011, before the long, long gap that followed. “He is Dior in the public imagination, still to this day, because what he built was so big in terms of the rebirth of fashion. I loved the idea of him being back at Dior. I felt like it was a full-circle moment,” Anderson told Business of Fashion, and I couldn’t agree more.
After the guests received their now-infamous flowers in a white Dior box that carried the show’s invitation, they walked in the venue only to be greeted by more flowers. A ceiling of them, actually. Cyclamen, of course. Everyone slowly took their seats, Brigitte Macron, France’s First Lady, Bernard Arnault, LVMH chairman, Jeff Bezos, Pharrell Williams, Jean-Paul Gaultier, Carla Bruni, Jennifer Lawrence, pretty much everyone, except Rihanna. Naturally, the show ran an hour late. Honestly, I think I’d wait for Rihanna too.
But when it finally started, the opener came as a trio of dresses with tulle-built hourglass volumes, familiar enough to remind us of the creative’s ready-to-wear debut. And as the show went on, those shapes only grew larger, thanks to Magdalene Odundo, a ceramicist Anderson likes to keep close. Every single look had some kind of flower attached to it. If it wasn’t on the garment, it was on the shoes, if it wasn’t on the shoes, it sat on a shoulder, and when it wasn’t on a shoulder, it ended up glued to the model’s ears. Still, the collection wasn’t nearly as extra as that sounds. Everything was toned down a notch, mixing high and low elements. I saw sculptural volumes, sparkling sequins, soft feathers, elegant drapes, but I also saw Raf Simons-coded coats, knitwear and ribbed tank tops, and I really enjoyed the tension. It kind of framed the ateliers’ power as something clear, essential, commanding.
“Couture is kind of an endangered craft, as a mindset, a mythology, and making with hand. What Dior is doing, and other couture houses, which there’s not many left, they’re protecting this endangered craft as a national symbol of making,” Anderson shared with Business of Fashion. “Dior couture needs to exist because they (the artisans) are practicing a skill that if you don’t practice would disappear.” And that’s exactly why haute couture carries that sense of sacredness. It exists far away from almost everyone, except for the few clients invited into the maison’s private world built around that collection. But that distance, the fact that 99.5% of the public remains on the outside, is the whole point. Couture feeds on imagination, and mostly lives there long after the show is over. It’s a backstreet in an industry that keeps growing bigger and faster every day, celebrating chosen pairs of hands, their work, their traditions, and the luxury of taking time.
