Jonathan Anderson opened his Dior chapter with a spring-summer 2026 collection that moved with curiosity, shaped by an interest in dressing as habit.
Staged in a replica of Berlin’s Gemäldegalerie, the setting offered the still air of a gallery before opening, where each look held its ground.
Anderson approached the season with an architect’s sensitivity to structure, using silhouette and proportion to stage a conversation between historical discipline and contemporary disruption.
Frock coats, bar jackets, and waistcoats pulled from Dior’s archive and earlier centuries were not treated as relics but as active garments, grounded in formality.
Wide denim, inflated cargos, and school-uniform socks under sandals collided with the tailoring, forcing the silhouette into unfamiliar directions. Shapes carried weight. Layers felt calculated, more like a process of construction than styling, as if the wearer were assembling a version of themselves from different eras at once.
Some looks recalled British rural dressing. Others hinted at post-war Paris tailoring. But the references never pulled focus. What held the collection together was a consistent interest in how clothes are worn. Neckties were loosened, shirts wrinkled, hems left slightly raw.
Accessories featured literary titles including Les Fleurs du Mal, In Cold Blood, and Dracula printed directly onto bags. They extended the collection’s dialogue between past and present into the space of books as objects. It was another way of asking how meaning is carried and how history is worn.
Anderson began his tenure with a designer’s kind of thinking: looking at what already exists and asking how it can be worn, reassembled or left alone. The result was a collection that treated the Dior archive not as inheritance but as material to be edited, contradicted and put to use.
Dior Spring/Summer 2026 Collection
