Dior’s decision to move its show slot to 9 a.m. from 2:30 p.m. because of the record-breaking French heat wave meant a short night for Paris showgoers, especially those who stayed up past midnight to see Madonna perform at the Saint Laurent after party.
Guests arriving at the Musée Nissim de Camondo were offered cold towels and fresh strawberries as temperatures inside the venue, currently under renovation, quickly reached boiling point. Those seated in the garden were handed old-fashioned parasols to ward off the sun’s piercing rays.
Though seemingly incongruous, the breakfast call time worked perfectly with Jonathan Anderson’s theme for spring 2027, which offered a looser take on the “disheveled aristocrat” aesthetic he set as a baseline with his debut Dior men’s show a year ago.
Models emerging from the mansion in sequined pants and dressing robe coats looked like they had reveled all night — the soundtrack by Fred Again still pulsing with dance tracks.
“Especially in London at the moment, there’s a whole new movement of kids going out to raves. Rave culture is starting back up again. You see it in the suburbs, you see it more outside of the city. I see it on the Seine at 7 o’clock in the morning. Something is changing, and kids are dressing up. They’re mixing things,” Anderson told reporters after the show.
Hence the high-low theme that ran through this lineup: artfully frayed denim shawl-collared jackets were paired with lavishly embroidered shirts and black dress pants, while a crisp pleated tuxedo shirt was tossed over stone-washed pink shorts and topped with a textured wool frock coat.
It was one of several more wearable versions of the replica historical garments Anderson sent out on the runway 12 months ago. He has also let go of the tricky shrunken Bar jackets and voluminous constructions of that debut collection.
While critically applauded by the fashion pack, his more conceptual ideas have yet to filter through to the Dior shop floor, where more traditional styles prevail. Perhaps that’s why he ramped up the classically commercial fare, like his cotton drill pajama suits with velvety collars.
Anderson described the job as a work in progress. With four men’s collections a year, he’s incrementally rewriting a brand vocabulary rooted in founder Christian Dior’s love of the 18th century — an obsession the couturier shared with Moïse de Camondo, who during his lifetime amassed a major collection of decorative arts from that period.
“For me, it’s just [you] keep refining and enjoying it, having fun with it, and trying to work out new codes, take codes away that you put in,” Anderson said.
The designer has a lot of boxes to tick.
Dior menswear is rooted in tailoring, which this season revolved around the new Bobby suit, a baggy style inspired by a vintage Marc Bohan jacket that Anderson purchased for himself. It came in sheer silk chiffon, printed with pinstripes or a houndstooth motif, in addition to more classic wool fabrics for day and evening.
As the first designer in charge of both men’s and women’s collections at Dior, he’s set himself the challenge of syncing the two. His fringed jackets and crinkled checked raincoat were direct echoes of looks included in his women’s cruise collection, presented in Los Angeles last month.
Then there’s the fact that the collection lands in stores from late December, which explains the profusion of heavy knits and sturdy outerwear, including a chocolate suede parka. Anderson suggested the system was out of sync with changing climate conditions.
“The calendar does not make any sense,” he said. “Deliveries now, it’s all a little bit fractured in that way, because wholesale is not as important as it used to be.”
Finally, Anderson needs to satisfy a broad customer base. “I have an interesting job, because I have to talk to an existing customer, which is a loyal client, and I have to feel about recruiting customers, so for me, in a weird way, I enjoy kind of like screwing with it,” he said. “It’s about experimentation.”
A few clear codes have started to coalesce. He summed them up in his own shorthand: “Formality, Eton, partying, going out, dressing up.” The glam thread he introduced last season is still fermenting, manifesting here with silver sequined pants, gold python shorts and “disco ball boots” inspired by the black mirror balls he sent as a show invitation.
If the final impression feels a little blurry, Anderson is fine with that. He doesn’t like the idea of a “totemic” look.
“It’s not just merchandising, it’s about how we build characters so that it can appeal to different age demographics. You can have a beautiful suede coat, we can put it with a gold python trouser or gold python shorts, but at the same time when you break it [down], it can be for my dad or it can be for me in the summer,” he argued.
“It takes time to define a look, and I think slowly, bit by bit, it starts to kind of click into place, and it’s enjoyable. I think fashion needs to be enjoyable,” he concluded.
