“Fashion has to be fun or it will eat itself,” Jonathan Anderson said backstage at his first Dior women’s show. Already after a touching mini-film about the house’s history, when the first model appeared in a white New Look silhouette dress, it became clear: Dior was in for some serious fun.
The year 2025 highlighted the hopes the fashion industry places on Anderson. In June, he became the first creative director in Dior’s history to oversee all divisions at once — men’s, women’s, and couture. By December, he had earned the title “Designer of the Year,” becoming the first designer to hold the award three years in a row.
Anderson has developed as a designer who approaches clothing primarily as an avant-garde experiment. After his appointment at Dior, it was difficult to imagine how such radical thinking could coexist with the house’s codes, which inevitably impose limits. Yet he managed the challenge — albeit not without nuances. Alongside impeccably constructed, almost architectural pieces like cropped coats and jackets with bow loops at the hips, Anderson demonstrated his strongest asset — commercial instinct. The runway featured bags with new shapes, romantic footwear, and almost weightless, playful accessories, which two months later migrated seamlessly into the women’s Pre-Fall collection.
Beyond commercial choices, the designer, of course, brought his own vision to Dior. For Anderson, this means total experimentation: putting a dress on a mannequin, realizing it looks too “boring,” and then transforming its shape — enlarging it, tying it in knots, cutting it into strips, shortening the skirt to the bare minimum, turning it into a scarf, a flower, or knitted loops. Anything that allows him to go beyond the familiar.
In the women’s line, Anderson chose to reveal this avant-garde language most openly. Yet here, experimentation often stripped pieces of dialogue with femininity — one of Dior’s key codes, which, unlike accessories, the designer barely referenced in the clothing. Aesthetically unconvincing were origami-like hats and crinoline skirts that visually resembled two large eggs under the skirt. Transparent dresses with crinoline rods looked more like the skeleton of a structure than a finished piece. Moreover, the construction did not sit at the waist but pressed directly into the model’s stomach, adding a sense of discomfort and impracticality. The same impression came from a blouse with a lace collar, which, at the slightest breeze — as seen on the runway — flipped upward and tickled the chin.
Interestingly, the men’s collection shown in June was hardly affected by such a pronounced avant-garde approach — the same can be said for the men’s Pre-Fall collection. It remains unclear what explains this divide, since logically both collections evolve in a single stylistic direction. In men’s Dior, we saw cargo shorts with a multi-layered back referencing the hem of Christian Dior’s Delft dress. In the women’s collection, these shorts transformed into a skirt. Many elements of the men’s line were directly quoted in the women’s — from prints to jacket silhouettes and collars in XVIII–XIX century styles. Perhaps this indicates that the designer is still in a phase of exploration, cautiously testing the ground.
Anderson’s main goal has been to free Dior from the status of “untouchability” and allow the house to be experimental and alive, without anchoring it to a specific decade. This approach reads quite clearly in the men’s line. Women’s Dior remains in a state of uncertainty. Perhaps to bring clarity, Anderson will need to find a more precise balance between his avant-garde language and the house’s feminine codes — seeing them not as restrictions, but as inspiration for new, aesthetically compelling experiments.
