For billionaires with an eye on best-dressed lists and Oscar nominees with sights set on red carpet domination, Paris haute couture – where a dress can take months to make by hand, and cost as much as a small apartment in the city – is a shopping opportunity. For the rest of the fashion industry, it is a battle for bragging rights between the haughtiest brand names in the world. With ambitious young designers newly installed at Dior and Chanel vying for domination, that battle is feistier than ever.
Haute couture is an arms race like no other. At 10 o’clock on a Monday morning, the Oscar nominee Teyana Taylor was in a diamond tiara in the front row of Schiaparelli, where the house is preparing for a lavish exhibition opening at the V&A Museum this spring. A few hours later in the garden of the Rodin Museum, where a mirrored Dior catwalk reflected a suspended canopy of lush moss studded with silk flowers, Pharrell Williams and the actor Josh O’Connor arrived promptly, but the show was delayed an hour for the arrival of Rihanna in a black satin cocoon coat.
Jonathan Anderson, the 41-year-old Northern Irish designer who took over as creative director last year, is spinning the historic house of Dior off on a tangent. For this first haute couture show, the hourglass silhouette of Christian Dior’s 1947 New Look became a silk georgette cocktail dress with pleats that twisted around the body like clay thrown on a pottery wheel. The shape, inspired by the work of the Kenyan-born British ceramicist Dame Magdalene Odundo, brought an urgent, kinetic energy to Dior’s classic curves. Meanwhile, the charming floral motifs adored by Monsieur Dior, a devoted gardener, became snowball-sized earmuffs of cyclamen, inspired by a bouquet which John Galliano, one of Anderson’s predecessors in the Dior job, brought as a gift when he visited the atelier last year.
The myth of Dior is built on curvaceous dresses and bestselling floral fragrance. But Anderson is gambling on re-energising the house by leaning into its dramatic backstory, rather than selling nostalgia for midcentury femininity in pursuit of a quick megabuck. At a preview before the show, he said “the guy” – meaning the house’s founder, Christian Dior – “changed fashion in 10 years. Hitchcock, cinema, everything. The shows he did, we look at them now as classicism, but at the time people were quite confused by them. And then he dropped dead.” (Dior died in 1957, just 10 years after the collection that made him a star.)
Anderson added: “It is very intimidating to do this job, because you are going up against people who are in the history books. My Dior is never going to be a formula, because my brain doesn’t work like that. I get bored too quickly. Everyone wants every designer right now to work out the brand, like, tomorrow. But Dior is ginormous. If I was to lock it down right now, and it was all perfect, you would never turn up to shows any more because there would be nothing to see. It has to be about the creative process.”
Anderson’s resistance to straightforward prettiness is divisive, but his reading of the history of Dior is that shock value can sell. “I believe that ideas can make money,” he said. “Dior was a genius business guy. He licensed his designs to make a lot of money.” His new look Dior has an alternative spirit but is grounded by accessories that suggest a gimlet eye on the bottom line. Loafers with Dior-branded cameo motifs, collectible clutch bags, and evening stoles thrown nonchalantly over an arm or a shoulder so that the Christian Dior label is on show, all pointed to strong commercial instincts. The collection will be on public display at the Rodin Museum, where the show was held, for a week-long exhibition beginning 28 January, which will also feature archival looks from Christian Dior’s first shows, and ceramics by Odundo which inspired Anderson.
There was a rare bright spot in what has been a bruising week for Victoria Beckham, when the designer was presented with the Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters at a ceremony and champagne reception hosted by the French minister for culture, Rachida Dati. The event, the timing of which was planned months before last week’s explosive statement from Beckham’s oldest son Brooklyn, was Beckham’s first public appearance since the story broke.
The Beckhams, Brooklyn excepted, put on an emphatic united front. David Beckham, formally dressed in a double-breasted suit, watched the presentation accompanied by the couple’s three younger children, who had travelled to celebrate the honour. Beckham herself cut a composed but low-key figure in an understated black dress, giving a short, formal speech thanking her husband, and “my parents and my children for always believing in my vision”. She called the award, which recognises her contribution to Paris fashion week where she has staged shows since 2022, “a profound privilege which reflects years of commitment and dedication”.
The turnout reflected a notable show of solidarity with Beckham from the fashion industry. Anna Wintour, the former British Vogue editor Edward Enninful, the supermodel Helena Christensen, the designer Haider Ackermann, the photographer Juergen Teller and French industry titans Antoine Arnault and François Pinault greeted the designer’s appearance on stage with a prolonged round of applause. Dati was lavish in praise of Beckham, calling her “a woman of your time” who “makes Paris shine, and describing her as “a global icon who holds a very special place in the hearts of the French people”.
