Can Jonathan Anderson Count on The Withering Dior Myth?
Sara Skillen wrote in 2019 a brilliant study on the legacy of Dior titled ‘Dior Without Dior.’ As the name suggests, Skillen, in the 204-page manual, details her analysis of how Dior built an evergreen name even after the departure of Christian Dior: keeping the ‘Dior Myth’ alive. Said myth is not one that is easy to maintain; it is something that requires consistent and persistent thoughtful marketing for it to make sense to the public. As Christian Dior was constructed as royal, Skillen confidently put, royalties need to be spoken about in order to stay relevant in today’s world. Moving forward from Christian Dior, first Yves Saint Laurent, though a talented designer, had to not only convince Dior’s customers that he was capable, but he also needed to continue the heritage; the same goes to Marc Bohan succeeding Yves Saint Laurent, Gianfranco Ferre after Bohan, so on and so forth. While the baton is being passed down one by one, years after Christian Dior’s departure, the brand has not forgotten to keep the Dior Myth alive for its target audience. Even today, albeit ever so weak, we can still feel the Diorness with us through Jonathan Anderson, thanks to the short film intro at the start of his latest womenswear collection, reminding us that we are now on Dior’s turf. To lay it out in words seems an easy feat on the surface, but many brands have miserably failed at such an attempt, namely Alexander McQueen, Mugler, Versace, and Gucci. In each of those cases, either the eponymous owner was so exceptional in what they did with the brand that it inadvertently overpowers anyone who comes after them, or the brand simply does not know what to do with itself.
Few brands, besides perhaps Chloé, have gone through a list of creative directors as extensive as Dior’s, which makes maintaining the Dior Myth and connecting different design characters to the motherlode even harder. The further away Christian Dior is from us, the less inclined anyone is to associate the contemporary Dior with its founder. But the brand strives to and has done exactly that, even with designers like Raf Simons, someone who is, on paper, such an antithesis to the overall aesthetic of Dior, has contributed positively to the ‘Dior Myth.’ Another equally vital point raised by Skillen is that Dior, as a maison, has successfully carved a creative director palimpsest; each designer’s work has hints of the previous, or an amalgamation of them. The latest womenswear collection by Jonathan Anderson has shown us the grace of the Dior archive, with a vision similar to his debut menswear. Perhaps Skillen would be illuminated by the fact that other creative directors are doing things just like her lab extrapolations.
However, the ‘Diorness’ isn’t purely scientific or a formulaic approach, like how Gianfranco Ferre wrote in Christian Dior: The Magic of Fashion, where he underscored the essence of a Dior design:
To perpetuate the spirit of Dior is to create pure, precisely drawn lines, with defined, perfectly balanced volume, and then underline them with amazing cutting techniques. Playing with the masculine-feminine also follows the Dior image — the use, for example, of harsher fabrics, like Prince of Wales and hound’s-tooth checks. I go beyond the historic trademarks of the House of Dior, but by doing so, I also reinforce them, using the counterplay of colours like the notes of an organ, an exchange between the contrasts of black and white, or the subtler shades of beige and grey.
With Anderson at the helm, we can certainly expect the opposite of formulaic. From the two collections’ perspective, Anderson swam joyfully in the archive, even if, in fact, the archive is momentarily acting as a life jacket while he figures things out, he made it look easy. The nod to the past consolidated with the short film opener, which showed clips of previous creative directors, including the aforementioned Gianfranco Ferre, depicting the general vibe of House of Dior. The short film set flashing through different points in the past is contrasted by bright white tubes of light and the very contemporary-looking show venue, and, of course, the gigantic screen in the middle on which the short film was shown, opened with an ominous question of ‘Do you dare enter, the House of Dior?’ The door swung open into a room that might as well have been a clip from Silent Hill. If you’re a follower of my work, you will understand that I am a fan of, not horror, but anything creepy and eerie. It is a feeling that plays with the grey area of ‘are you in danger? Or is it all in your head?’ I found myself pumped with adrenaline when I watched those foreboding 4 seconds. Are we about to be overwhelmed by the yin of Dior that Anderson has awakened? Safe to say, the collection reflected nothing of such joy of psychological horror. Instead, a complementary but slightly cliché walk down memory lane, but Anderson’s image of Dior is a refreshing one, a retro-futuristic Edwardian Sloane, an aristocrat who is too hip to don themselves in old-school ruffles but too posh for your Ralph Lauren jumper and cricket gear, to describe reductively. It’s incredibly clean, almost too clean, and the colors are slightly muted but decorated with blade-sharp folds. And just how does an atelier succeed at something so complex as the infinity pleated fold on the pants in Look 17? A very commendable thing from Anderson is that he did not participate in the ‘flair bubble’ where designers tend to add a bit of ‘flair’ to a dull design (e.g. oversized ribbon to hide a plain suit underneath, unnecessarily complex cummerbund in a relatively simple ensemble, nay collection, etc.) Every detail is harmonized. Yes, harmony, that’s the word I am looking for in both Anderson’s collections, but is harmony and craftsmanship enough?
It goes without saying that we all have immense faith in Jonathan Anderson, the golden boy who revived a Spanish brand that has been flirting with absolute irrelevance for years, and Anderson swooped in in 2013 and performed the best CPR known to man. So how can anything bad be said about Anderson when all of us are rooting for him? Anderson’s collection, both men’s and women’s, seemed to have checked all the boxes in fulfilling the withering Dior Myth, and as he had prefaced before the showing of his collections, he wanted to pay homage to previous designers before bulldozing this myth altogether. But just as I commented after his menswear debut, Anderson’s creations are too reliant on how our perception of Dior influences our assessment of his clothes. Even with his given pretext that this vision is only temporary, I still found myself emotionally conflicted with this new beginning. Should we overlook the misfire just because he promised us a ‘better future’? One that we were all hoping for in the first place anyway?
Both Dior and Dior Homme, have, in my opinion, been struggling to help the brand regain its artistic status that it once exuded for a long time now. While Kim Jones’ reign will go down in history books and perhaps another page in Skillen’s future analysis, the pair of Chiuri and Jones, and I’d go as far as to say designers after John Galliano, have positioned Dior as a name to wear but not a name to admire. Anderson’s current output seems to be stuck in the middle, a grey area that is more refined than everyday wear but less than what we would expect from dreamy Dior couture. For pieces that fall outside of this description, like the short skirts, they fail to capture any form of discussing relevance. And exactly for this in-betweenness, it was read as indecisiveness for me.
When Sarah Burton debuted at Givenchy earlier this year, her undisputable passion to bring back the founding history of the brand was distasteful for two main reasons: who cares about Hubert de Givenchy still, and why are we skipping over the impact other creative directors have made, that ultimately created this contemporary image of Givenchy? While Anderson, in the short film, has included, if not mistaken, clips of all previous creative directors, his work of referencing the archive definitely only touched on the earliest bit of the brand. And to the first point I made about Burton, why do we need to care about Christian Dior, when the mysticism surrounding the founder is, as I mentioned, withering away? It would have been miles better in my opinion if Jonathan Anderson had worked his magic, designed with the same mindset of reviving the Spanish sleeping giant, show us his interpretation of Dior to remind us why Dior is what it is, then proceed to utilize the archive to cement his chapter in the ongoing Book of Dior. Anderson’s respectful gesture of paying homage felt strong in spirit, but in all honesty, with the disconnection I sense, this thank you card might be better conveyed, perhaps with a better consolidated Dior image foundation, through an interseason collection as a reset before we cycle back to Fall-Winter Men’s.
We are, after all, asking a lot from the Golden Boy because our collective faith is so high, too high almost, a crushing weight on Anderson’s shoulder. And of course, we all crave and expect Dior to produce the best of the best. Couture is yet to come, and we will not understand Jonathan Anderson’s full capability yet until then. At least that’s what we hope for.