Dior's Hollywood Show Was a Movie
Jonathan Anderson never reached his original goal. The Northern Irish fashion designer moved to America aged 18 with aspirations of seeing his name in lights, enrolling in the Washington Shakespeare Theatre Company to study drama. But he ended up abandoning that dream, attending London College of Fashion, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Now, at 41-years of age, he has finally made it to Hollywood, not as an actor but as the creative director of Dior. Things worked out pretty well in the end! And the three-time Designer of the Year winner let his inner film nerd go wild for Dior’s Cruise 2027 show.
The show notes, normally a semi-pretentious document evocatively rolling through a fashion show’s inspirations, were written in the style of a film script; Hollywood royalty like Al Pacino perched in the front row; and Anderson unveiled clothing designs with Hollywood-themed easter eggs.
Highsnobiety snuck backstage before it all began, and got up close to it all.
The bar jacket Christian Dior made for Marlene Dietrich to wear in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1950s thriller Stage Fright was reborn as new outerwear, some with raw threads flailing from the bottom. One long flannel overcoat printed with the shadow of Venetian blinds was said to be informed by film noir. The shirts, created in collaboration with American pop artist Ed Ruscha, included one embroidered with “says I, to myself, says I,” winking at Uncle Colm’s catchphrase in the Irish sitcom Derry Girls (okay, maybe it’s not Hollywood exactly, but this was a cable television classic).
There was even a potential reference to an as-yet-unreleased film. Irish milliner Philip Treacy recreated a feather headpiece he once created many years ago for Isabella Blow, except instead of reading “BLOW” the feathers spelled out words like “Dior” and “Star”. An Isabella Blow biopic, The Queen of Fashion, following the life of the magazine editor who famously bought Alexander McQueen’s entire graduate collection in 1992, is premiering later this year.
Are these headpieces a hint that Anderson, who recently worked on costume design for Luca Guadagnino films like Challengers and Queer, is involved with the biopic? Probably not. But, it certainly sounds like he wants to get involved.
“This is part of a bigger picture that will unfold throughout the year, from films that I will do costumes for, or franchises that we will do costume for,” he told The Guardian at the LA show. “It’s a starting point of how the bridge between fashion, commerce, and film could be reimagined.”
So, consider this show the first act of Anderson’s Dior movie.
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