Few towns lionise their own mythologies quite like LA. The place is basically an open air shrine erected in its own honour – or, at least, that’s what was made felt in the run up to Dior’s Resort 2027 show. Over the days prefacing the main spectacle, lucky guests (myself included) shuttled around sites quietly integral to the city’s lore – the Goldwyn House; Charlie Chaplin’s recording studio; and yes, the Hollywood Sign.
That lore came to life beneath the yawning bough of the Peter Zumthor-designed Geffen Galleries at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the mammoth concrete blob splatted across Wilshire Boulevard that opened just a month ago. Beneath it, dappled in the light of a tequila sunrise gloaming, a constellation of stars more shimmery than any you’d find in the sky had gathered in eager anticipation: Miley Cyrus, Sabrina Carpenter, Jeff Goldblum, Greta Lee, Jisoo… I could go on.
What had brought them there was the occasion of Jonathan Anderson’s first cruise show – not only for the house of Dior, but in his whole career. The air of festivity was therefore a given, but this glitzy vignette of a frow served as a crucial reminder that Dior’s relationship to Tinseltown is no modern matter – it’s as old as the house itself.
The relationship between the fashion house and the Western world’s greatest dream factory stretches all the way back to the maison’s earliest years. It was, after all, none other than Marlene Dietrich who, in 1950, famously declared, “No Dior, No Dietrich!” to Alfred Hitchcock during the production of Stage Fright, insisting that her costumes for the film be designed by the eminent couturier of the Post-War period. From then on, Dior became synonymous with the apotheosis of Hollywood glamour – a byword for names such as Marilyn Monroe, Rita Hayworth, Grace Kelly.
Indeed, Dior has long been so intertwined with the glamour of Hollywood that it’s hard not to think of the two institutions as star-crossed lovers – protagonists in a chintzy tale of soulmates meeting, nourishing and growing with one another in perfect two-time step.
The reality, of course, is rather more consciously engineered. “We always see Dior as this romantic character, but he was a very, very shrewd businessman. I think we underestimate how much correspondence he had with these very big executives,” Anderson pondered in a preview ahead of the show. Warner Bros girls, Paramount leading ladies… they all wore Dior more on account of carefully inked deals, rather than a pure sense of romantic affinity.
The relationship between the glossy impression and the grunting reality of what’s required to create served as something of a conceptual paradigm for Anderson – it also aptly reflects the nature of film production in itself. After all, the experience of loitering on a studio backlot looks very different to the final image we see on screens, but that doesn’t discount the fundamental reality of the process that leads to a final picture’s creation.
This, of course, is something Anderson knows from recent firsthand experience. Alongside his two full time gigs at the helm of Dior and his namesake label, he’s been costuming the filmic universes of director Luca Guadagnino. While the collection he presented in LA was neither exactly an extension of that hustle nor rooted in the premise of costume design, Anderson took a similar affective tack, creating clothes imbued with a shimmering appeal that read as though they were looks taken from the post-production screen made real.
While these weren’t clothes designed for names on a credit scroll, they were hardly devoid of character. Fucked-up debutantes in sequin string dresses; cruisy rockers in shredded jeans; gala-ready ladies in liquid satin gowns. Scotty Bowers, the notoriously libidinal former gas station attendant better known for the notches he put in bedposts across Hollywood was as much an inspiration as Marlene Dietrich (that squared-off white tux jacket, by the way, is based on the very same one she wore in Stage Fright).
Essentially, this was a positing of life as cinema: daylight houndstooth coats, cable knit capes and shredded-hem tweed coats were darted with sequins, their matter scintillating in the beamers of vintage Cadillacs hidden in the fog; the roughed up patches on distressed denim jeans glistened in a ghostly manner, loose threads subbed out for fine silver chains – others came in muzzy bouclés. Decadent yet formally austere ’50s embroideries featured throughout. Gradient blurs on tailoring directly echoed seen-through-the-slats shadows cast on the concrete walls.
There was a sense of split reality. While those present were only too aware of the fact that the concrete blob they sat beneath was one of the world’s most prestigious art museums, the location didn’t dominate in the imagery. This was a conscious effect: “I was really thinking about how you can take a space like this and transform it for the camera lens, so everyone who’s in the audience will see it in one way, and everyone online will see it in a completely different way,” Anderson says. “There’s two experiences to it.”
While, to some, the notion of presenting a meta-dialogue on cinema in LA may land as almost too obvious, too cliché, that was exactly the point. “I like the idea of the cliché,” Anderson says. “And we’re in LA! It's a moment to lean in, and sometimes it’s fine to put a bit of irony in it. You can have fun with it. I quite like that you lean into clichés, but at the same time lean into reality.”
A similar premise undergirds the collection’s main art narrative – well, the other one, besides doing a show under the world’s most anticipated museum opening of the decade. In what marks the first major collaboration with a contemporary artist of Jonathan’s tenure at Dior (a mainstay of his spin at Loewe), we saw a partnership with legendary American artist Ed Ruscha. Comprising a series of archetypal men’s shirts – flannels, poplin dinner shirts – the pieces were masterful studies in how to “take something like the men’s shirt, make it a canvas”, Anderson explained.
While these pieces leaned into and evoked archetypes, playfully underscoring their role in consolidating cultural mythologies, Anderson also turned his analytical lens on Dior itself through witty invocations of its own history. A red dress featured around look 50, as a nod to Monsieur Dior’s similar programming knack as a way of “waking people up”, Anderson said. The Bar jacket was recast as a boiled Donegal tweed coat and carapace overlaid with gossamer checked chiffon. Drawing on his legendary hats for Isabella Blow, Philip Treacy created hats with plumed spellings-out of the words “Dior” and “Buzz”.
In the context of the mid-production mise-en-scene, it opened a dialogue about the fundamental cinematography nature of fashion, and its propensity to fuel dreams. There’s more to come, Anderson says: “This whole thing is building into a bigger picture that we will see unfold throughout the year in terms of cinema. It’s the first of five big sections that we will do in cinema, from films that I will do costume for to franchises and collaborations that we will do within film. So it’s a starting point of our vision of how to bridge fashion and commerce and film.”
As ever with Jonathan Anderson, this was a body of work that was densely layered, weirdly meta and juicily cerebral. But it was also just really beautiful. This wasn’t just a Dior show about cinema; it was a Dior show as cinema. Granted, what you’ll see will be the studio release version – shot from certain angles, captured in carefully considered lighting, it will be different from what it was like to be “on set”, so to speak. But, rather than dispel the magic of the “finished” result, witnessing it firsthand only enhanced it. Trust me, it really did feel just like it does in the movies.