The Dior Cruise show just took a flight to the States, not exactly unknown territory for Jonathan Anderson, who left Ireland as a teenager with plans of becoming an actor, before the fashion industry got its hands on him. Monsieur Dior himself spent some quality time in Los Angeles, back when old Hollywood glamour was just Hollywood glamour. “No Dior, no Dietrich,” said Marlene Dietrich while working on Alfred Hitchcock’s Stage Fright. Some people’s Californian dream simply includes dressing Elizabeth Taylor, Grace Kelly, Marilyn Monroe and a few Oscars along the way. Not a bad starting point for a cruise collection, if you ask me.
Get French chic and a bit of savoir-faire to play nice with Hollywood and everyday Americana, and you’ve got yourself a show. Which, of course, only gets better with vintage cars and film noir lighting inside LACMA’s new, and concrete-heavy, David Geffen Galleries. Enough to bring Al Pacino, Miley Cyrus, Anya Taylor-Joy, and Sabrina Carpenter to Mid-Wilshire for the evening. Carpenter showed up in a yellow dress, rosettes sitting around the hips, which later surfaced as the opening look. No surprise for anyone who had read the show notes, written as if it were a script: ‘A model appears on the runway in a buttercup-yellow dress…’
That dress also came as part of a trio, polite enough to offer a purple or black option. Next came the strongest Bar jacket I’ve seen so far, in sparkling donegal tweed, with threads dangling off the hem as if it had been freshly destroyed. What followed were poppy heads built in volume, satin skirts refusing symmetry, boas leaning on texture, robe coats, loose evening dresses, fringe, ribbons, John Galliano references, bias-cuts, newspaper-print bags (Chanel’s Cruise already went there, hopefully no one else follows), and everything in between.
The men (their first time sharing a runway with the Dior woman) walked out in the absolute Anderson uniform, shirt and jeans, alongside leather trousers, a suit here and there, the occasional knitted cape, and feathered (and worded) Philip Treacy headpieces, a nod to the late Isabella Blow, famously seen in a Treacy original built around her name.
“What you’re seeing here, is part of a kind of broader picture of what we will do over the next 12 months in cinema. We’re in Hollywood, and we’re starting something, but it will be a larger picture thing that we will do with franchises, with film, with other things. So this is going to be like: how does a fashion house work with cinema? And how does the cinema work with a fashion house, and what is a new type of business model within that?” the designer told Vogue. Ready for a cinematic year, then.
