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Dior you could wear in Dalston: creative director Anderson makes daring debut
The Guardian
|October 02, 2025
It was the biggest Paris fashion week moment in years. There were two best actress Oscar-winners in the audience (Mikey Madison, Charlize Theron) and the daughter of a third (Sunday Rose Kidman Urban) on the catwalk. There were so many K-pop stars that the teenagers of Paris had packed out the Tuileries garden from dawn.
The French first ladies Brigitte Macron and Carla Bruni-Sarkozy caught up in the front row, and Willow Smith, Anya Taylor-Joy and Bernard Arnault were also in attendance. The filmmaker Luca Guadagnino had designed the stage set around an upside down glass pyramid directly invoking the Louvre.
"Well, Dior is drama," shrugged the Northern Irish designer Jonathan Anderson, 41, who was making his debut. Dressed as usual in jeans, navy jumper and trainers - if you saw the most impactful designer of his generation in the queue at Tesco, you wouldn't blink an eye - Anderson was facing up to the challenge.
Nowhere is there more pressure to deliver a new look than at the house where, in 1947, Christian Dior's New Look collection invented the idea of fashion as news. Those postwar hourglass suits, which changed the way women dressed, caused a global sensation. And never has the pressure been more intense than this year, when the £300bn global luxury industry is battling a sharp downturn. All eyes were on this show not just to reinvent Dior, but to jolt fashion itself out of its slump.
This story is from the October 02, 2025 edition of The Guardian.
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