Jonathan Anderson’s Dior Show Made Reinvention Look Glamorous
At LACMA, Dior’s new era looked less like a vacation fantasy and more like the thrill of becoming someone new.
Cruise collections are usually sold as a fantasy of escape: the faraway destination, the perfect suitcase, the woman breezing beautifully through some glamorous, far-flung place in silk scarves and woven bags. Jonathan Anderson’s Dior show at LACMA imagined a much more interesting woman: the one who comes to Los Angeles to become someone.
L.A. has always belonged to that woman. The aspiring actress showing up to casting calls with impossible optimism. The writer convinced she has the next great script in her tote. The woman reinventing herself after a breakup, a burnout, or both. It is the city that helped turn Norma Jeane into Marilyn Monroe; where Joan Didion and Eve Babitz built entire aesthetics around women in various states of glamour, ambition, and unraveling; where countless women have arrived hoping to become stars, or at least leave as someone different than they were when they got there.
The setting helped sell it. At LACMA, the concrete architecture looked almost cinematic against the setting sun, with palm trees swaying in the background and vintage cars parked everywhere like props on a studio backlot. Even the show notes read less like traditional collection notes than the opening pages of a movie script. Before a single look came down the runway, Anderson had already made the point: this is not just resort dressing.
And historically speaking, LACMA made sense for Anderson because he has never treated fashion as just clothes. His collections tend to pull from art, objects, craft, and odd little cultural references. Here, the show notes’ references—Ed Ruscha, old Hollywood actresses, California poppies, Christian Dior’s idea of “the dream”—felt like pieces of the same plot. It also feels like a clever evolution for Dior, a house that has always understood fantasy, just usually in a much more polished register. Anderson’s version is looser, stranger, and a little more fun.
There were vintage-looking furs, ruffle collars with a whiff of Jimi Hendrix, bug-eye sunglasses, and swaggering shearling-lined coats, which gave the collection a dose of old Hollywood excess rather than polite resort polish. Texture was everywhere: shearling, chiffon, fur, ruffles, shine—but it never felt overworked. The effect was less “dressed for vacation” than “dressed for a life already in progress.”
That is what makes Anderson’s Dior feel interesting right now. Luxury fashion has spent the past several years making women look expensive, tasteful, and a little anonymous. Anderson seems to be pushing toward something more specific: women who feel like actual characters, not just well-dressed placeholders.
And that may be the bigger takeaway from L.A. The fantasy is no longer just where the Dior woman is going. It’s becoming the woman everyone is watching when she gets there.
