Rewrite
For his sophomore menswear outing at Dior, the Northern Irish designer turns up the heat, spinning aristo-youth through Paul Poiret’s rebellious spirit as he reworks house codes with his own unmistakable set of Anderson-isms.
Have you ever wondered what it might feel like to live in somebody else’s skin for a day? To wake up somewhere else in the world as an entirely different person – less The Substance, more Freaky Friday – and see what sticks? Would you stutter your way through it, clinging to familiar habits? Or would you plunge headfirst into the delicious unknown that comes with a borrowed identity? Would you finally find the nerve to flirt with your biggest fears, ask time to pause, bathe yourself inside out, and begin again as a blank canvas?
Or would you slip on a yolk‑yellow wig, shimmy into a slinky sequinned tank, shrug on a hulking fur‑cuffed coat, pull up a pair of figure‑hugging trousers and fling yourself into the world to the sound of Mk.gee’s “Alesis”? Because that’s exactly what I’d do. And, apparently, Jonathan Anderson too.
It’s a wet, needling Wednesday afternoon in Wonderland’s Soho offices, the kind of post-Blue Monday week that typically resists joy altogether. That is, of course, unless it’s Paris Fashion Week. And it’s Dior day. Jonathan Anderson is about to unveil his sophomore menswear collection, following his 2025 debut as the Maison’s new head – the first designer to take on the role full-time across men’s, women’s, and haute couture since Christian Dior himself. The air is thick with tension as we – young, fashionable, and unapologetically entitled fashion writers and editors – huddle around a laptop, teeth clenched, watching a parade of A-listers climb the steps of Paris’s Musée Rodin.
His appointment landed amid what might well be fashion’s most feverish twelve moments in recent memory. Creative directors hopped houses at breakneck speed, sliding into the industry’s coveted seats while serving up debut collections that offered our first taste of their new kitchens – familiar, heritage ingredients, reworked with varying degrees of daring. The pressure cooker bubbled as we watched: some scorched the charts, others simmered safely, a few turned sharp and bitter. And then there was Jonathan Anderson at Dior.
Ever the over‑achiever, a performance maximalist by instinct, Anderson is indisputably one of his generation’s defining talents. A capital‑D Designer, his influence spills far beyond the runway – as an art fiend, costume maker, cultural sponge, and, long before the phrase existed, a certified vibe curator. He wears his big brain lightly, threading erudition through seams, cuffs, and tote bags with ease. Yet for all the brainpower at play, Anderson never forgets the joke. A sharp, self-aware humour that’s become his strongest card up his sleeve.
He has done it with his eponymous JW Anderson – a universe in which a pigeon bag and frog slippers can exist with improbable elegance – and again during his critically lauded tenure at Loewe. There is Loewe the house, and then there is Loewe the cultural engine: the Anthurium top, Taylor Russell’s Met Gala wooden corset, a TikTok presence that became as fluent as the collections themselves.
For want of a better word, Jonathan Anderson is a craftsman ahead of his time – but he is also, quite simply, a funny guy. Which is precisely why the question looming over his direction at Dior felt inescapable. Would he temper his instincts to accommodate the weight of heritage, or was he about to tilt one of fashion’s most storied maisons ever so slightly off its axis?
The answer arrives almost instantly. Three seconds into his second collection for Dior Men, a model strides out in a sequinned V-neck, skinny acid-wash jeans and snake-print, D-toed boots. He is followed by another, hair sheathed in those canary-yellow wigs. Subtlety is not the point. A new era of Dior is unmistakably underway, buckling up feels less like advice than a requirement – good thing a golden, ornate branded belt is here to soften the shell shock.
“The play on history and affluence has evolved, absorbed in a new set of influences,” reads the show notes. Jonathan Anderson is storytelling once again. This is the next chapter in the character study that underpinned his debut collections, but also a fresh dawn for his source material. Here, the Dior aristo-youth is reframed, observed through a new lens. In Anderson’s fantasy, they drift through Paris as modern-day flâneurs, until a pause outside Dior’s landmark Avenue Montaigne boutique, where a small commemorative plaque, a homage to Paul Poiret, catches their eye.
Often cited as one of the first couturiers, Poiret was a radical of his time: dismantling the strictures of traditional couture, liberating women from the corset, lowering the waistline and championing the body’s natural fluidity. His influence has rippled through generations, perhaps most notably through John Galliano, whose Autumn/Winter 2009 collection for Dior drew heavily on Poiret’s fascination with North Africa, the Middle East, and East Asia – references that also surfaced on Anderson’s moodboards for AW26.
Yet this was no exercise in reverence alone. While Anderson nodded to Poiret’s codes and legacy – the thrilling sequinned tank tops that opened the show reworking one of the couturier’s iconic silhouettes, his luminous patterned jacquards resurfacing as capes draped over long jackets with opulent fur cuffs – the collection’s true charge lay elsewhere. It was Poiret’s spirit of rebellion, filtered through Dior’s aristo-youth, that ultimately set the tone.
Autumn/Winter 26 unfolds as a study in contradiction. Codes of formality collide with contemporary notions of aristocracy; Dior’s most recognisable tropes rub shoulders with a punk attitude; denim and parkas are folded into the same visual language as couture heritage. Everything is mashed into a single, indulgent meal – one designed to satiate a craving we didn’t quite know we had. “Style is treated as a discourse, approached with empathy and élan,” the show notes explain, and the collection takes that premise seriously.
What follows is a feast of exuberance, edging knowingly into camp. Anderson calls it “eclectic opulence”, a phrase that materialises through polo and flannel shirts embroidered with sequenced épaulettes, worn alongside a gleefully Frankensteined approach to tailoring. Dior’s Bar jacket is cropped to the waist and acid-washed in denim; tailcoats are thrown over open-collared button-ups and finished with snakeskin loafers and electric hair; blazers are shrunk to near Polly Pocket proportions. Trousers, meanwhile, are Hedi Slimane-ified – shrivelled, figure-hugging – before reappearing elsewhere as boy-ish fitting cargos.
Outerwear emerges as a particularly assertive score. Here, the same collision of references plays out at full volume: technical fabrics trading places with opulence, jaw-dropping fur-cuffed jackets stealing focus, bombers dissolving into brocade capes, balloon-backed field jackets and cocooning coats. At its most extreme, a floor-sweeping puffer lined entirely in fur reads as couture’s answer to Glastonbury glamping – proof that, really, you need little more to survive a night at Worthy Farm in comfort. Military references run throughout, extending beyond the fringed shoulders as Anderson revisits his ongoing fascination with the military jacket, following the Napoleon-esque iteration seen in Pre-Fall 26.
Though the collection is presented under the Dior Men banner, it quickly becomes apparent that binary distinctions have little place in Anderson’s universe. “The masculine and feminine divide is joyfully blurred,” the show notes state – and to the sound of Mk.gee, it tracks. Anderson’s aristo-youth have neither the time nor the inclination to worry about siloed aesthetic hierarchies. Instead, he offers a menu that feels broadly invitational: yes, gated by a formidable price point, but functioning as a necessary palate cleanse. In doing so, he restores something to one of fashion’s most storied houses that has felt conspicuously absent for some time. Dior is, once again, good craic.
As for what aristocracy looks like in the modern world, that question seems designed to linger rather than resolve on Anderson’s runway. What does land with clarity, however, is a gentler proposition – perhaps even an instruction, if you will. Loosen up a little, and have some fun, lads.
Words – Sofia Ferreira
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For his sophomore menswear outing at Dior, the Northern Irish designer turns up the heat, spinning aristo-youth through Paul Poiret’s rebellious spirit as he reworks house codes with his own unmistakable set of Anderson-isms.
Have you ever wondered what it might feel like to live in somebody else’s skin for a day? To wake up somewhere else in the world as an entirely different person – less The Substance, more Freaky Friday – and see what sticks? Would you stutter your way through it, clinging to familiar habits? Or would you plunge headfirst into the delicious unknown that comes with a borrowed identity? Would you finally find the nerve to flirt with your biggest fears, ask time to pause, bathe yourself inside out, and begin again as a blank canvas?
Or would you slip on a yolk‑yellow wig, shimmy into a slinky sequinned tank, shrug on a hulking fur‑cuffed coat, pull up a pair of figure‑hugging trousers and fling yourself into the world to the sound of Mk.gee’s “Alesis”? Because that’s exactly what I’d do. And, apparently, Jonathan Anderson too.
It’s a wet, needling Wednesday afternoon in Wonderland’s Soho offices, the kind of post-Blue Monday week that typically resists joy altogether. That is, of course, unless it’s Paris Fashion Week. And it’s Dior day. Jonathan Anderson is about to unveil his sophomore menswear collection, following his 2025 debut as the Maison’s new head – the first designer to take on the role full-time across men’s, women’s, and haute couture since Christian Dior himself. The air is thick with tension as we – young, fashionable, and unapologetically entitled fashion writers and editors – huddle around a laptop, teeth clenched, watching a parade of A-listers climb the steps of Paris’s Musée Rodin.
His appointment landed amid what might well be fashion’s most feverish twelve moments in recent memory. Creative directors hopped houses at breakneck speed, sliding into the industry’s coveted seats while serving up debut collections that offered our first taste of their new kitchens – familiar, heritage ingredients, reworked with varying degrees of daring. The pressure cooker bubbled as we watched: some scorched the charts, others simmered safely, a few turned sharp and bitter. And then there was Jonathan Anderson at Dior.
Ever the over‑achiever, a performance maximalist by instinct, Anderson is indisputably one of his generation’s defining talents. A capital‑D Designer, his influence spills far beyond the runway – as an art fiend, costume maker, cultural sponge, and, long before the phrase existed, a certified vibe curator. He wears his big brain lightly, threading erudition through seams, cuffs, and tote bags with ease. Yet for all the brainpower at play, Anderson never forgets the joke. A sharp, self-aware humour that’s become his strongest card up his sleeve.
He has done it with his eponymous JW Anderson – a universe in which a pigeon bag and frog slippers can exist with improbable elegance – and again during his critically lauded tenure at Loewe. There is Loewe the house, and then there is Loewe the cultural engine: the Anthurium top, Taylor Russell’s Met Gala wooden corset, a TikTok presence that became as fluent as the collections themselves.
For want of a better word, Jonathan Anderson is a craftsman ahead of his time – but he is also, quite simply, a funny guy. Which is precisely why the question looming over his direction at Dior felt inescapable. Would he temper his instincts to accommodate the weight of heritage, or was he about to tilt one of fashion’s most storied maisons ever so slightly off its axis?
The answer arrives almost instantly. Three seconds into his second collection for Dior Men, a model strides out in a sequinned V-neck, skinny acid-wash jeans and snake-print, D-toed boots. He is followed by another, hair sheathed in those canary-yellow wigs. Subtlety is not the point. A new era of Dior is unmistakably underway, buckling up feels less like advice than a requirement – good thing a golden, ornate branded belt is here to soften the shell shock.
“The play on history and affluence has evolved, absorbed in a new set of influences,” reads the show notes. Jonathan Anderson is storytelling once again. This is the next chapter in the character study that underpinned his debut collections, but also a fresh dawn for his source material. Here, the Dior aristo-youth is reframed, observed through a new lens. In Anderson’s fantasy, they drift through Paris as modern-day flâneurs, until a pause outside Dior’s landmark Avenue Montaigne boutique, where a small commemorative plaque, a homage to Paul Poiret, catches their eye.
Often cited as one of the first couturiers, Poiret was a radical of his time: dismantling the strictures of traditional couture, liberating women from the corset, lowering the waistline and championing the body’s natural fluidity. His influence has rippled through generations, perhaps most notably through John Galliano, whose Autumn/Winter 2009 collection for Dior drew heavily on Poiret’s fascination with North Africa, the Middle East, and East Asia – references that also surfaced on Anderson’s moodboards for AW26.
Yet this was no exercise in reverence alone. While Anderson nodded to Poiret’s codes and legacy – the thrilling sequinned tank tops that opened the show reworking one of the couturier’s iconic silhouettes, his luminous patterned jacquards resurfacing as capes draped over long jackets with opulent fur cuffs – the collection’s true charge lay elsewhere. It was Poiret’s spirit of rebellion, filtered through Dior’s aristo-youth, that ultimately set the tone.
Autumn/Winter 26 unfolds as a study in contradiction. Codes of formality collide with contemporary notions of aristocracy; Dior’s most recognisable tropes rub shoulders with a punk attitude; denim and parkas are folded into the same visual language as couture heritage. Everything is mashed into a single, indulgent meal – one designed to satiate a craving we didn’t quite know we had. “Style is treated as a discourse, approached with empathy and élan,” the show notes explain, and the collection takes that premise seriously.
What follows is a feast of exuberance, edging knowingly into camp. Anderson calls it “eclectic opulence”, a phrase that materialises through polo and flannel shirts embroidered with sequenced épaulettes, worn alongside a gleefully Frankensteined approach to tailoring. Dior’s Bar jacket is cropped to the waist and acid-washed in denim; tailcoats are thrown over open-collared button-ups and finished with snakeskin loafers and electric hair; blazers are shrunk to near Polly Pocket proportions. Trousers, meanwhile, are Hedi Slimane-ified – shrivelled, figure-hugging – before reappearing elsewhere as boy-ish fitting cargos.
Outerwear emerges as a particularly assertive score. Here, the same collision of references plays out at full volume: technical fabrics trading places with opulence, jaw-dropping fur-cuffed jackets stealing focus, bombers dissolving into brocade capes, balloon-backed field jackets and cocooning coats. At its most extreme, a floor-sweeping puffer lined entirely in fur reads as couture’s answer to Glastonbury glamping – proof that, really, you need little more to survive a night at Worthy Farm in comfort. Military references run throughout, extending beyond the fringed shoulders as Anderson revisits his ongoing fascination with the military jacket, following the Napoleon-esque iteration seen in Pre-Fall 26.
Though the collection is presented under the Dior Men banner, it quickly becomes apparent that binary distinctions have little place in Anderson’s universe. “The masculine and feminine divide is joyfully blurred,” the show notes state – and to the sound of Mk.gee, it tracks. Anderson’s aristo-youth have neither the time nor the inclination to worry about siloed aesthetic hierarchies. Instead, he offers a menu that feels broadly invitational: yes, gated by a formidable price point, but functioning as a necessary palate cleanse. In doing so, he restores something to one of fashion’s most storied houses that has felt conspicuously absent for some time. Dior is, once again, good craic.
As for what aristocracy looks like in the modern world, that question seems designed to linger rather than resolve on Anderson’s runway. What does land with clarity, however, is a gentler proposition – perhaps even an instruction, if you will. Loosen up a little, and have some fun, lads.
Words – Sofia Ferreira
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