Dior opened Haute Couture Week on Monday with the fashion world’s attention split between Paris and New York, where, three days earlier, Taylor Swift had reportedly married Travis Kelce in custom Dior. No official images have surfaced, yet speculation across social media over the 4th of July weekend reached remarkable levels for a dress nobody has officially seen. Jonathan Anderson, characteristically, had little interest in feeding the frenzy. Instead, he redirected the conversation towards Lynda Benglis. As he wrote in his show notes, the collection was “a response, in the language of couture,” to the work of the American sculptor.
Dior.
The Musée Rodin, appropriately, hosted the show. Sabrina Carpenter and Josh O’Connor were in the front row, as oversized ferns filled the space – a continuation of the botanical motifs Anderson had been seeding across his social media for weeks. The garden, the studio, the laboratory: these are the places where Anderson operates, and the Benglis reference made all three feel like the same room. Benglis, the American sculptor now in her eighties, has spent her career transforming two-dimensional materials into three-dimensional form through knotting, pleating and moulding. Couture, Anderson argued through every look, does exactly the same thing.
Dior.
The hand-plissé work throughout the collection was some of the most extraordinary technical couture on a Paris runway in recent memory. Dresses arrived in great architecturally constructed waves of pleated silk chiffon, gowns that seemed to hold their shape through the same logic that Benglis’s latex and foam sculptures hold theirs: surface tension, weight distribution, the properties of the material itself pushing against what the form wants to do. Hats joined in, wide-brimmed and pleated. And fans, which have been circulating through the audience all week as Paris endures one of its most punishing heatwaves in years, appeared on the runway as part of the looks themselves, or rather, as peacock trails.
The Benglis ‘Peacock’ series, begun in the late 1970s after she stayed at the Sarabhai family estate in Ahmedabad, was interpreted in brightly coloured floral and beaded embellishments that brought warmth and vivid India-adjacent colour to what might otherwise have been a collection in danger of reading as too intellectual. The Bar jacket, Dior’s most revisited house code, arrived here in its softest iteration yet, almost knitted in its texture, the structure dissolving into something that draped. A longer coat version in bright green was among the collection’s most covetable pieces. Ferns continued their quiet journey across the collection, embroidered over sleeves, pressed into textiles and trailing across hems with the subtlety that couture rewards.
Dior.
One of the most talked-about moments came midway through the show: Benglis’s 1974 ‘Artforum’ advertisement, in which she appeared naked holding an oversized dildo, was rendered as a holographic outline on a beaded look Anderson called ‘Mirage.’ Anderson does not make easy choices, and this is the version of Dior that the house needs right now.
The accessories deepened the argument. Four bag shapes were made in direct collaboration with Benglis: the Dior Cigale in metallic plissé, a sculptural Dior Bow, a Lady Dior and a Petit Dîner each with a Benglis-inspired bow. The Dior Anthology series continues with the Petit Dîner and mini Lady Dior surfaced in fragments of 18th-century Indian chintz and indiennes sourced from a specialist dealer, antique textiles repurposed as luxury object surfaces. Shoes, designed with Nina Christen, mirrored the collection’s surfaces in satin colour-block pumps with elongated square toes, sheer pumps decorated with Peacock-inspired ornaments and metallic square-toed styles with abstract winged embellishments. Jewellery, handcrafted between France and India, paired mother-of-pearl, carved green onyx and rock crystal with intricate micromosaic floral motifs borrowed from antique Indian textiles.
Dior.
The show closed, as couture tradition requires, with a bride. A pale strapless column gown under a long veil of hand-pleated chiffon, trimmed with feathered dandelions and embroidered cactus flowers. The second wedding dress Anderson had presented this week, and the only one anyone could photograph.
‘Grammar of Forms’, an accompanying exhibition bringing together looks from the collection, Dior archive pieces and works by Lynda Benglis, including several shown in France for the first time, remains on view at the Musée Rodin until 12 July.
Discover the collection here.
photography. courtesy of Adrien Dirand, Dior
words. Gennaro Costanzo
