Dior SS26: Jonathan Anderson’s couture debut wants you to touch grass

Jonathan Anderson is the busiest man in fashion, but you already knew that by now. Last week, the Irish designer presented his sophomore menswear collection for the house of Dior, blending Paul Poiret and – quite surprisingly – the New Jersey musician Mk.gee, in order to interrogate how today’s aristocratic youth might dress. 

Today, we move to his couture debut, and the designer brought together the world’s biggest stars for a horticultural feast for the eyes. Too busy pruning your own garden? Scroll down for everything that happened at the show.

Anderson’s usual cabal of front row faces were out in force for his couture debut, including house ambassadors Greta Lee and Josh O’Connor, plus more of his faves like Taylor Russell, Alexa Chung, Anya Taylor-Joy and Ethel Cain. Former Dior designer John Galliano was also there at Anderson’s request, but guest of honour was of course Rihanna, who arrived last in a dramatic floor-length gown and a thick coat to keep out the Paris chill. 

Today, guests returned to the same show space as last week’s menswear show – a giant purpose-built structure in the gardens of the Musée Rodin. This time, however, the interior of the catwalk had been completely transformed – while the men’s show was lined with chestnut brown curtains, today’s ceiling was covered with moss, flowers, and tree branches, reflected by the mirrored walls to give the impression we were completely encased by nature.

As expected, the extravagant set spoke to Anderson’s inspiration for the season. “When you copy nature, you always learn something. Nature offers no fixed conclusions, only systems in motion – evolving, adapting, enduring,” read this season’s show notes. “Haute couture belongs to this same logic: a laboratory of ideas where experimentation is inseparable from craft, and time-honoured techniques are activated as living knowledge. It is a way of seeing – an interpretive lens through which the present is examined, reassembled and imagined anew.”

The show began, and the dawn of Dior’s new couture era appeared: a thick black column of a gown, buoyed by a globular hoop skirt, and its surface covered in multiple folds and tied in a bow at the hem. Over the model’s arm lay bright green shreds made to look like long grass, and hanging from her ear was a silk-cut cyclamen bouquet, the flower that John Galliano gifted to Anderson before his ready-to-wear debut last year.

We’ve seen Anderson explore nature before, most memorably for Loewe’s SS23 men’s collection, where live greenery sprouted from trainers, trousers and coats. This time, Anderson was approaching the subject through the savoir faire of couture: layered gowns resembled bouquets of lilies, silk cut flowers were painstakingly applied to canonical gowns, while dresses in fluid and gestural forms looked like they’d sprouted from a garden, rather than been constructed in an atelier. It seems that, in a world overrun by AI deepfakes and nefarious technocrats, J Dubs clearly wants us to go outside and smell the roses.

Anderson also approached this season as if he were building a wunderkammer (that’s a cabinet of curiosities for those not fluent in German). Also known as ‘rooms of wonder’, wunderkammers were basically little one-roomed museums that became popular in Renaissance Europe, displaying exotic artefacts, religious relics and other interesting objects. “This collection, his first foray into couture, is constructed like a wunderkammer – a place where museum-quality pieces and natural wonders are gathered and recontextualised, offering a new means of preservation through transformation,” said the show notes. “For Anderson, couture too, is without guarantee; it is an endangered form of knowledge that survives only through practice. To create it is to protect it.”