Fashion is sometimes talked about like a nightmare: one full of pain-inducing garments that bind and distort the body, beauty standards that distort the soul and a value system that skews to the grotesque.
Rarely, however, has it been a designer — one of the industry’s favored sons — raising the subject.
Yet there was Jonathan Anderson, freshly installed creative director of Dior, unveiling his first women’s wear collection for the brand and starting the whole thing off with a horror film.
Screened on an upside-down pyramid hung over his runway, the film essentially positioned Dior as house haunted by the ghosts of designers past (Christian Dior himself, Yves Saint Laurent, Marc Bohan, Gianfranco Ferré, John Galliano, Hedi Slimane, Kris Van Assche, Raf Simons, Kim Jones and Maria Grazia Chiuri), as well as popular expectations. Footage of fashion shows and various celebrity ambassadors were spliced together with flashes of blood, lightning strikes and shrieks. It was like Hitchcock meets “The Devil Wears Prada” on hyperspeed.
Created by Adam Curtis, the British documentary filmmaker/social historian, the movie served as both a whistle-stop tour of how Dior got to here and a suggestion that the fashion industry was now nothing so much as a blood sport. Knives out!
But it was also the claiming of a birthright; a reminder that although Dior has recently become a sort of cosplay couturier for upper-crust elegance (Melania Trump’s favorite first lady look is a Dior suit), Mr. Dior’s initial collections in postwar France left some of his audience with their mouths open in alarm at the extravagance. And it laid the groundwork for Mr. Anderson’s collection, which positioned Dior as a petri dish rather than a ponderous institution.
The result wasn’t so much a proposition for dressing as an exercise in Dior concepting: Diorisms chopped up, recombined, abstracted and otherwise loosed from the stays of history.
Classic Dior bar jackets had been shrunk to doll size, the better to literally reduce the shadow they cast, and then paired with equally tiny pleated skirts, so together the combination was exactly the same size as a classic bar jacket on its own. (That was a good idea.) Other bars had their the peplum transformed into two big bow-like loops over the hips and then paired with denim miniskirts. (That was a more wearable idea).
There were sleeveless satin dresses with big basket-weave skirts jutting out at either side (teased on Anya Taylor-Joy at the Toronto International Film Festival in early September), and draped off-the-shoulder jersey frocks stretched over bulbous panniers. Or maybe rubber exercise balls? They will probably look great in pictures, but on the runway resembled nothing so much as a Brazilian butt lift gone awry. A simple A-line dress composed of hundreds of ivory beaded petals was a more modern, halter version of the 1949 Dior Junon gown now at the Met’s Costume Institute.
And there was more. There was a push-pull between dressing up and dressing for day. There were knit capes worn with jeans that also appeared in Mr. Anderson’s June men’s wear show, which was a sort of prelude to this collection, and miniskirts with duck-like frills at the back (also in the men’s wear as cargo shorts; Mr. Anderson is the first Dior creative director given the reins of both sides of the house). Hats that looked like a cross between a French military tricorn and the wings of a supersonic jet. And numerous design gestures that might be familiar to anyone who followed Mr. Anderson’s work in his previous gigs at Loewe and his own brand, JW Anderson.
There was a lot, including a sense of playfulness in the clothes that hasn’t been seen at Dior for a long time.
What there wasn’t, really, was a clear proposal of who exactly Mr. Anderson’s Dior woman might be — except that she likes to experiment, isn’t particularly fond of received convention and probably isn’t Mrs. Trump.
In a preview, Mr. Anderson positioned the collection’s messiness as deliberate, saying he wanted his Dior to be a house with a little something for everyone. In practice, however, it seemed more unfocused. Which is not the same as shocking. Or horrifying.
It’s possible the new Dior may cause some of its more classic customers to clutch their pearls and cry for help. But that would probably take an even more dramatic aesthetic upheaval (and anyway, odds are there will be plenty of traditional stuff in stores). Despite the buildup, this one wasn’t so scary after all. Though it was kind of a scream.
Vanessa Friedman has been the fashion director and chief fashion critic for The Times since 2014.
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