Dior designer Jonathan Anderson drew inspiration from nature and his love of ceramics for his debut Haute Couture collection on Monday, just days after mixed reviews for his menswear.
The 41-year-old has the daunting task of designing all three fashion lines at one of the world's biggest brands — women's and men's ready-to-wear, plus Haute Couture — the first person to do so since Christian Dior himself.
Just days after sending out dozens of new looks during Paris Men's Fashion Week in a show that some observers saw as daring but lacking coherence, the Northern Irish creative was back with his first Haute Couture collection.
It featured floral motifs on fabrics or as accessories, while sculptural bulbous dresses were inspired by the work of Kenya-born ceramicist Magdelene Odundo.
"When you copy nature, you always learn something", Anderson declared in his show notes, which compared Haute Couture to a living ecosystem that is "evolving, adapting, enduring".
A-list attendees at the show at the Rodin Museum included actors Jennifer Lawrence and singer Rihanna as well as Amazon boss Jeff Bezos and his wife Lauren Sanchez.
Mixed men's
Last Wednesday, the former Loewe designer delivered his second menswear collection since his promotion to French luxury conglomerate LVMH's second-largest fashion brand in April last year.
Inspired by the idea of "today's aristocrats", it featured "angst and a kind of wrongness, engulfing wrong taste", Anderson told reporters, departing from his safer approach last year.
He radically redrew the Dior signature Bar jacket and sent out shirts adorned with rhinestone-fringed epaulettes while models donned yellow or spiked wigs.
Influential fashion website WWD said Anderson had gone "searching for thrills" in what amounted to a "fashion version of extreme mountaineering".
The New York Times said the man behind his own JW Anderson brand and considered one of his generation's leading lights was "thinking about many — perhaps too many — disparate ideas".
"He's taking Dior somewhere completely unprecedented. But I think he's exactly where he should be, since he's not there to rehash old ideas", Adrien Communier from GQ magazine in France said. — AFP
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