PARIS — Dior turned the Musée Rodin into a celebrity waiting room — then into a garden — on the first day of Paris Couture Week, as Jonathan Anderson presented his debut haute couture collection for the house.
Guests packed into the museum as the start time drifted. French first lady Brigitte Macron arrived. Lauren Sánchez Bezos swept in. Parker Posey twirled in her trench-dress. And then the whole room, celebrities and editors alike, sat and waited for Rihanna. When the pop star finally took her seat, the lights dropped on a suspended ceiling hung with a garden of flowers. Gravity did its quiet work: a bloom loosened and fell to the floor.
It was a fitting opening image for Anderson’s first Dior haute couture show: beauty under pressure.
Anderson, the Northern Irish designer who revived Loewe with craft and wit, is now doing something Dior has never asked of one person in the modern era: he commands menswear, womenswear, and couture at once. That scale matters — Dior is one of the main engines of the luxury conglomerate LVMH, and couture is where a house shows its power.
The collection was pitched as “nature in motion,” with technique treated as living knowledge, not museum display, according to the house. Anderson followed that logic, reworking fragments of the past into something meant to feel new. From the start, the palette was disciplined — blacks, whites, and ecru — then punctured by flashes of color and texture. Lines were clean. Draping softened, then snapped back into structure.
A sublime silken Asian-style coat, strict and elegant, was cut through with black lapels that felt both archival and modern.
The house’s history appeared not as costume but as distortion. The show’s oddest and most telling jokes were the pannier gowns: 18th-century volume reimagined as a take on a fanny pack silhouette. It was classic Anderson: take something precious, tilt it, and make the result feel both witty and exact.
Anderson also nodded to a broader Dior lineage without leaning on nostalgia. The house cited bunches of cyclamen given to Anderson by its former creative director John Galliano, and the show carried a faint echo of Galliano-style spectacle — filtered through Anderson’s cooler, more controlled hand. Hydrangea-like blooms appeared as oversized earrings throughout, a decorative flourish that felt like Dior’s house codes pushing him toward embellishment.
For all the ambition, the accomplished show occasionally felt like a set of strong parts still settling into a single defining line, according to AP fashion writer Thomas Adamson. The ceiling garden promised one complete world; at times, the clothes felt like a designer still deciding where that garden begins and ends.
Across town, Schiaparelli said it with plumes. Designer Daniel Roseberry presented a collection at the Petit Palais with painted ceilings evoking the Sistine Chapel, graced by Sánchez Bezos and her husband Jeff, as well as Demi Moore. Roseberry framed the collection as a push from “thinking” to “feeling,” per the house. The show featured sharp-shouldered “Elsa” jackets with gravity-defying hips, bustiers molded like armor, and skirts blooming in smoky sfumato tulle from nude to black. Nearly 70,000 Schiaparelli feathers were used, including one showpiece with 65,000 handset feathers.
As an opening salvo for couture week, both houses made the message clear: this season, subtlety can wait.