At the Musée Rodin, flowers, craft and curiosity converge as Dior’s new creative director positions haute couture as an evolving laboratory rather than a fixed heritage.
With a meadow suspended overhead, Jonathan Anderson’s haute couture debut for Dior unfolded beneath a ceiling of flowers at the Musée Rodin, transforming the historic venue into a living ecosystem. The gesture inevitably recalled Raf Simons’ own floral interventions for the house, most memorably his 2015 couture show, when the museum’s walls were entirely enveloped in blooms, moments that redefined Dior couture as an immersive, almost devotional encounter with nature.
If Simons framed flowers as architecture, Anderson treats them as living thought.
The show notes offered more insight: when you copy nature, you always learn something. Nature, they suggested, offers no fixed conclusions, only systems in motion, evolving and adapting over time. Haute couture, in Anderson’s view, belongs to this same logic. It is not a static repository of heritage, but a laboratory of ideas where experimentation and craft are inseparable, and where time-honoured techniques remain active, living knowledge.
For his first couture collection, Anderson approaches Dior not as a revivalist but as a collector. Objects that spark emotion are gathered and reordered into an abstract whole, the collection constructed like a wunderkammer, a cabinet of curiosities where artefacts, textures and natural forms coexist for quiet contemplation rather than spectacle.
Flowers were everywhere
Orchids appeared as bedazzled jewellery, dangling from ears or resting on shoulders. They were embroidered into gowns, magnified and repeated, echoed again above the audience’s heads. The reference was both personal and historical. Christian Dior himself was an avid gardener, and Anderson underlined that lineage in a recent Instagram post recalling a moment just before his first women’s show for the house, when John Galliano visited bearing two posies of cyclamen tied with black silk ribbon, alongside a bag of cakes and sweets from Tesco for the atelier team. “They were the most beautiful flowers I’d ever seen,” Anderson wrote.
Alongside the florals, the anthropomorphic ceramics of Magdalene Odundo informed sculptural silhouettes throughout the collection. The show opened with dresses that draped gently around the body, amplifying curves and gestures rather than constraining them. Bows placed unexpectedly at hems and seams kept the mood playful, resisting the solemnity that couture can sometimes default to.
Handwork dominated, with micro-scale techniques expanded into macro effects. Flowers were cut from silk or condensed into dense, tactile embroideries. Textured threads were handwoven into speckled tweeds. Nets layered over ballooning volumes like veils, softening structure without dissolving it. Knitwear, rarely foregrounded in couture, entered the lexicon here as an assertion of manual dexterity and experimentation rather than comfort alone.
Accessories were conceived as singular artefacts. Moulded handbags and transformed found materials appeared less as products than as curiosities, each object carrying the quiet autonomy of a collector’s piece.
Not all responses were unequivocal. Some critics noted that the collection may have benefited from tighter editing. Fashion’s newest Instagram critic, BoringNotCom, observed that the show only truly came alive once black entered the colour palette and a sharper silhouette emerged, a critique that points to the tension between abundance and focus inherent in Anderson’s cabinet-of-wonders approach.
Still, as a debut, the collection established a clear philosophical position. Rather than using couture to monumentalise the past, Anderson positions it as a thinking tool, space where ideas are tested through the hands, and where nature, memory and craft are treated as living systems rather than fixed references.
