When cabaret star Justin Vivian Bond moved from New York to London more than two decades ago to study at Central Saint Martins, at first they felt like they’d made a terrible mistake. That was before they met budding fashion designer Jonathan Anderson and eventually performed at his student fashion show.
In a full-circle moment, Bond stepped on stage at Cherry Lane Theatre in New York Thursday night for a performance to mark Dior’s partnership with indie film company A24, which owns the theater.
“We became friends and when he did his degree show he asked me if I would perform at it and I was like ‘sure, kid’ and so I performed at his first show and here we are all these years later,” Bond said of Anderson, now creative director of women’s, men’s and haute couture collections at Dior.
Anderson designed the costumes especially for the performance, with Bond dressed in an archival piece by Paul Poiret.
On the film side, guests included Josh Safdie and Nathan Fielder, who just made a stir after the release of the trailer for his A24 documentary on Elizabeth Holmes, “You Can See Everything.”
Other notable guests included 070 Shake, Alexa Chung, Emily Ratajkowski, Grace Gummer, Francesca Scorsese, Sarita Choudhury and Michelle Zauner. And of course, Jonathan Anderson, the man of the moment, was in attendance.
As announced earlier this week, Dior and A24 entered a two-year creative partnership spanning film, theater and live events, with the former serving as the premier partner of Cherry Lane Theatre.
