Portraits by Annie Leibovitz. Fashion Photographs by Stef Mitchell.
The light outside is pale and fading late one Friday afternoon on a quiet Paris street, as Jonathan Anderson settles at a large table in his office to sort through the pieces of the future. “What do we have to go through?” he asks.
With surgical focus, his design director, Alberto Dalla Colletta, runs through the day’s couture decisions before turning to pressing matters in women’s ready-to-wear. “This is that skirt we repaired,” he says, flipping through a stack of papers. “It’s becoming more of a thing, which I thought was fun.”
“The back is nice,” Anderson says briskly, then nods for the next item. Tall and intense, with a flare of auburn hair and a rich Irish baritone, Anderson, 41, now holds one of the most powerful roles in fashion: creative director of Dior. His appointment last year was met with widespread excitement across the industry. He had just finished an 11-year tenure at Loewe, where he energized the field with a creatively eclectic style—drawing from fashion history and his own wide-ranging interests to bring a fresh, crisp allure to the market. Remarkably, he did all this while also leading his own London-based brand, JW Anderson, now 18 years old. His couture debut in February was a springtime explosion of floral-like volume, showcasing the vast technical expertise of Dior.
“He can go in any kind of direction—I don’t think of his designs as looking like one thing,” says Jennifer Lawrence, one of the first to wear Anderson’s Dior dresses on the red carpet. “Usually you might get three sketches that are all in the same universe. With Jonathan, it looks like 25 different designers sending me 25 different options. His range constantly amazes me.”
Dalla Colletta moves on, sounding vaguely apologetic. “The colors didn’t come out major, in my opinion. The brown is a bit—”
“You know what could be quite good, actually, is trying one where you have brown with gold,” Anderson suggests, undeterred.
“Oh, wow. Okay.”
“Could be weird,” Anderson says, tilting his head to the side.
On the mantel across the office sits a bag printed with “Ulysses by James Joyce”—part of Anderson’s book-cover bag series—while his desk holds a manual typewriter and fruit-shaped candles. Eight wheeled panels, scattered randomly around the room, are pinned with images from an advertising campaign in progress. A mannequin is draped with marked-up calico toile, and two clothing racks surround the table. The excitement around Anderson’s appointment stemmed partly from its high-stakes nature: he is the first designer since Christian Dior himself to oversee all fashion lines—women’s, men’s, and couture, including bags and shoes. That means ten heavily anticipated collections a year for one of Paris’s largest couture houses. Meetings are layered and move at a breakneck pace.
“Then this was for the other reference you gave us,” Dalla Colletta continues. “We’re going to try to do the jacquard by cutting all the fringes like that.”
Anderson runs a hand through his hair and glares at the page. His working manner often resembles that of a man waiting outside a village hospital surgery, anxious for news. At his left elbow, as usual, lies a scatter of personal items as if he’s emptied a bag onto the table: an iPhone, a coffee cup, a bottle of Evian, a case with earbuds, a box of Tic Tacs, a pack of cigarettes, a small tape measure, and a bright green zippered coin pouch that reads “Dumb as a Dream”—a Loewe collaboration with artist Richard Hawkins.
“Nice,” he says finally, then leans in for a closer look. “Though here the colors are not so nice.”Dalla Colletta shows him two more pages, and then Anderson, rushing to another meeting, hurries out of the room. “One-hour meetings in 10 minutes with Jonathan,” Dalla Colletta says with a smile as he gathers his papers to leave.
Anderson’s first women’s show for Dior, held in the Tuileries, was for months the most anticipated event in Paris. In the hour before it began, a crowd spilled out from the park into the Place de la Concorde. Some bystanders wore costumes. Others held up signs and cheered for every celebrity—Jennifer Lawrence, Sabrina Carpenter, Anya Taylor-Joy, Jisoo, Jimin, Robert Pattinson, Johnny Depp, and many more—who passed along a path cleared by security guards through the parting crowd.
Inside a large, tan-colored structure built over the Tuileries’ octagonal fountain, filmmaker Luca Guadagnino and his production designer Stefano Baisi had created a low-ceilinged gallery. The walls, mottled gray, were trimmed with layered Italian modernist moldings, and boxy wooden stools were arranged as seating. “We wanted to create a space almost like a museum,” says Guadagnino, who met Anderson about fifteen years ago and worked with him on costumes for three of his recent films.
When the lights dimmed to black, a short montage by documentarian Adam Curtis was projected onto triangular screens. “Do You Dare Enter the House of Dior?” read a title card, and the sequence that followed transformed footage from Dior’s 78-year history into something like a horror film. Then the lights came up again, as if from an uneasy dream, and Anderson’s first women’s collection began to parade out.
There were pleated twisted fabrics, cropped skirt suits in tweed, and lace woven in eerie, jagged patterns. There were variations on Dior’s famous bar jacket and playful twists on its classic dress shapes. With bib fronts, turndown collars, bow cravats, and rich, sharp plaids, the collection nodded to the decorous midcentury ideals of fashion. But its unusual volumes, vertically tightened proportions, and sudden, startling cuts—as if whole garments had been made and then, like herbs, trimmed back to their living roots—gave the traditionalism an extreme and vaguely perverse edge.
Most noticeably, the looks echoed the style Anderson introduced in his first men’s collection in June, which included womenswear-inspired elements like a high-volume, almost bustle-like pair of cargo shorts. Delphine Arnault, the company’s chair and CEO, tells me that the potential to design men’s and women’s collections not just side by side but in tandem, creating the new concept of a “Dior couple,” was at the heart of his pitch for such unusually comprehensive control.
“It’s a modern vision: You can see the look on men and women with an interchangeability,” she says. It is also a vision Anderson has pursued since his earliest days as a designer at his own brand, when in 2013 he caused a stir by including a pair of ruffle-bottom shorts with a miniskirt silhouette in his men’s collection.
Justin Vivian Bond, the actor, cabaret artist, and trans rights advocate, describes Anderson as “one of the first designers to really bridge the gap between female and male collections—he’ll always have a guy or two in the women’s show, and vice versa, and that speaks to me. I don’t feel it’s contrived: It’s logical and fun.” Bond first met Anderson more than 20 years ago, when Rufus Wainwright brought him to a show Bond was doing in London. “He made me a knit cap with feathers in it and a fake-ermine wrap and this amazing headband with nets that had flies caught in it—all very early Jonathan.”
Eventually, Anderson asked Bond if they would perform in his senior show at the London College of Fashion; the two have collaborated on projects ever since, most recently on an opera called Complications in Sue (Anderson designed the costumes). “For all the serious…I believe that creating these amazing shows and then seeing people celebrate him boosted his confidence more and more. Anderson’s passions turned out to be contagious: O’Connor, whose grandmother was a ceramicist, came to share some of them. “I remember going to Jonathan’s for dinner one night and seeing this incredible display—his ceramics collection is magical! He had pieces by Sara Flynn, an Irish ceramicist I really admire. He had Lucie Rie. He had a large collection of Ian Godfrey,” he says. Anderson traces this passion back to his maternal grandfather, who worked at a textile company called Samuel Lamont & Sons in Antrim, Northern Ireland. “He was the creative one in our family,” Anderson says. “And as a child, you were surrounded by a lot of fine china on display.”
Many of Anderson’s friendships and relationships today revolve around art. Recently, he has been dating the Catalan artist Pol Anglada, with whom he worked at JW Anderson. “In anyone’s private life, when you have a job like this, it’s difficult,” he tells me. “I saw it with my parents when my father was working for the World Cup. When you go away and come back, you have to rediscover each other. As you get older, you learn you have to make time if you want to protect your relationships. Because it’s very easy to let them slip—you have to build in a system.”
Otherwise, these days his interests often follow the demands of his work. “Right now, there’s a look book every week. There’s a campaign every week. You’re searching for ideas most of the day,” he says. Then, as if thinking that description didn’t capture the excitement, he adds, “But it’s also an obsession—an artist or a person or a piece of vintage clothing could inspire an entire collection.”
One December morning, I arrange to meet Anderson at the Musée d’Orsay, where he is stopping to see a major exhibition on the British painter Bridget Riley, whose 1988 canvas Daphne he owns. Anderson arrives late: He says he never looks at his daily schedule ahead of time or plans for his next set of meetings, afraid he’ll second-guess whether they’re worthwhile; unsurprisingly, he’s always running behind. He seems tired.
“I’ve never looked forward to Christmas so much in my life—and I’m not a Christmas person,” he says, listing his current projects, as much for himself as for me. “We have one more fitting for couture, one more for men’s, and one more for women’s. And the launch of the cruise collection, and then we just put the pre-fall and Riviera collections out to the market. This season is always the hardest because it’s so short.” He gives a pained smile—”But still positive!”—and marches through the museum’s vaulted center.
Anderson tells me he admires how Riley pares her work down to its essence. “Like, you have the confidence to go all the way,” he says. “You can find that in great Indian painting. Even in a Rembrandt—they know when to stop. It invites your mind to think more about why you’re standing in front of it.”
The exhibition’s curator, Nicolas Gausserand, who has been following us, points out the color of the wall: white. Riley, now in her mid-90s, insisted, against museum practice, that Seurat’s work would be enhanced by being displayed on white walls.
“It makes the whites whiter,” Anderson says, nodding. “It’s so radical.” He takes a final walk through the galleries, then heads for the door. “You need to go through briskly to get your brain going,” he explains as we leave the museum. “If I stay too long, I don’t see connections. I think because of my grandfather, it’s always been about how you find something new within something that’s already old. By having it converse with what’s happening today.”
We slip into a booth at the old wood-paneled riverside restaurant Le…We ended up at Voltaire for lunch—not what we had originally planned, but we were running behind, so the schedule was, as often happens with Anderson, rearranged on the spot. Waiters bring plates of radishes, salami, bread, and butter. Anderson orders a filet de boeuf, medium-well.
“Medium-well takes 30 minutes,” the waiter informs us, with what might be a hint of well-concealed disapproval.
“Maybe just medium, actually,” Anderson says. “And some fries—go wild.”
“D’accord,” the waiter murmurs with a poker-faced nod.
Anderson keeps one foot in London, where JW Anderson is expanding into furniture, art, and collectibles. He says he sometimes feels a kind of cultural whiplash moving between there and Paris. “They’re very different cities in the way you eat or go out,” he explains. “The funniest main difference is, I don’t know what it is in France, but they’re not very good at ice. The gin and tonics here are never very good because the ice isn’t very good.”
As we settle into our meal, Anderson tells me that he sees his current cultural project as “trying to work out purpose” for a luxury brand in the digital age.
“The reason I was drawn to fashion was designing something for the future: You design it, you show it, and it goes into stores in six months,” he says. “That gives the consumer time to digest it. Now we’re in this period where we’re designing clothing to get an immediate reaction—by the time it hits the store, it’s lost its energy. It’s a sugar rush.” The trouble, he adds, is that it’s almost impossible to maintain a standard of quality in that environment.
“It affects understanding. We’re used to consuming millions of images a day, but when it comes to reading, we consume less. We reply with an emoji. We send voice notes because it’s ‘more efficient.’ When I was younger, I would have thought this was the dream scenario.” (Anderson is dyslexic.) “But making clothing is brain-to-hand, and writing is brain-to-hand. They’re unusual actions.” It’s precisely that intentional effort that, for years, allowed fashion to move beyond the sugar-rush present and shape the future, Anderson believes. The world needs time to sit with new ideas for them to take hold.
Anderson slices his steak vigorously. “My weakness is that I can get emotionally worked up over the most mundane things,” he admits. “It could be a model not being available, or it could be ‘We can’t get this one tiny venue.’ It could be a meeting that just doesn’t feel right. It forces me into anger—anger at myself, ultimately. But what makes me most angry right now is that we have no patience. I don’t have any patience, so I’m part of the problem. We just consume something, cancel it, and move on. I think this is destructive to creativity. I believe there’s a lack of great film and great music because people are scared to be radical.”
Couture—a new realm for Anderson—fascinates him as a way to rebuild a culture of daring and appreciation. He dreams of making Dior’s new couture more accessible—his model, he says, is an open-entry museum like the V&A—so that people who can’t afford a couture dress can still learn to appreciate the craftsmanship up close. “It’s about getting people to love fashion,” he explains. “Couture may not be what everyone buys, but it’s the trunk of the tree that supports everything else—the legacy, the hand, the knowledge.”
Two looks from Anderson’s Monday couture debut in Paris.
Photographed by Acielle / StyleDuMonde
John Galliano—Anderson’s childhood hero—lent his support at the couture show.
Photographed by Acielle / StyleDuMonde
For Anderson, couture is also “the most personal” of his work at Dior, because it’s the form he is still learning. His debut couture collection waInspired by John Galliano, the first outsider to whom he showed his women’s collection—“because when I was younger, he was like God,” Anderson says. “John came with a bag of food from Tesco and these two immaculate posies of wild cyclamen—I love cyclamen.” The flowers, from Galliano’s own garden, touched Anderson deeply. In a tribute to Galliano—and an unusually gallant nod to a living precursor—cyclamen became a motif of the collection, appearing in embroidery and decor as Anderson drew inspiration from 18th-century textiles and antique portrait miniatures. He decided the couture show would open with two versions of the lantern-shaped dress, black and white, that had launched his women’s show.
“I love the technique, so I thought, okay—how do we do it in a ready-to-wear way, and how can we show it in a couture way?” he says. “I collect Chelsea ceramics, and when you see first-period or second-period Chelsea, it looks the same, but it’s made in a completely different way. It’s not that one is better than the other; they just have a different dynamic.”
The show, held in a softly mirrored space with a mossy ceiling of cyclamen, presented a shimmering array of 63 pieces in spring and evening colors. In the language of couture, the plissé dresses moved with a languid grace, the beadwork came alive with individual motion, and the petal-like layers of some dresses seemed to bloom. The knitwear, in its unusual forms, carried an air of organic growth, as if drawn from the garden, while the antique-inspired fabrics shimmered freshly under modern indoor light. Anderson sent delicate, shell-like dresses down the runway. He offered exquisite embroidery and black overcoats that were quiet masterworks of tailoring and drapery. He introduced large floral pompom earrings that seemed like small bursts of joy. The show was emotional for its creator and many in attendance—both Anderson and Galliano, who was present, grew teary—and stood as a testament to the beauty of precise craftsmanship and the enduring interplay of change and continuity over time.
The balance between fine details and grand ambitions is where Anderson’s creative mind and drive most often meet. “As much as there are days when my head is about to blow, I always know I will do everything in my power to make it work,” he says. “Not just for me, but for all the people I’ve brought into this project. I have to make it work—for them.”
“In anyone’s private life, when you’re doing a job like this, it’s hard. As you get older, you learn you have to carve out the time if you want to protect it.”
Since taking the Dior job, much of Anderson’s life has been spent in transit. In November and December, aside from his regular commuting around Europe, he traveled to New York, Doha, and Beijing on brand business while actively working on six separate collections. One bright, crisp morning in Los Angeles, he hurried down to the lobby of the Chateau Marmont to begin a series of meetings that would culminate in celebrating a new boutique in Beverly Hills. “I’ve always loved coming to LA—I would never live here, but I love being here,” he says, devouring a large bowl of yogurt and granola, gripping the spoon like a water dipper. Two young women across the room surreptitiously photographed him—a reminder, in the capital of celebrity, that with Dior’s rising global profile, Anderson has become a celebrity himself.
On his first trip to Los Angeles, Anderson says, he got in a cab and asked the driver to take him to 10086 Sunset Boulevard—Norma Desmond’s address. “It’s like a garage or something,” he told me. “But there’s nothing better than a Hollywood character from bygone days.” He partly laments the unmediated accessibility of today’s celebrities, which he feels has eroded an aura of mystery.They have lost the iconographic power they once held. “There was a time when Dior would create the look for the actress, controlling the silhouette, the idea, the personality. I think we need that romance of what cinema told us fashion is,” he says, glancing thoughtfully toward a candelabra near the bar. “I wouldn’t mind if Dior, in the future, became a little camp, a little performative—I think John opened the door to that. And Dior himself built the door.”
The new Dior boutique on Rodeo Drive—a four-floor wonder with a floating spiral staircase—represents one effort to restore a coherent image. “It’s a new chapter for Dior,” says Arnault. Designed by architect Peter Marino, the store features a roof terrace, private VIP lounges, and a restaurant with menus by Dominique Crenn, the first female chef in America to earn three Michelin stars. Since last summer, similar boutiques have opened or will open in Beijing, Milan, New York, and Osaka, all modeled on the enormous Dior store at 30 Avenue Montaigne in Paris. “These are very big statements and very big investments for us,” Arnault notes, adding that even in a digital age, in-person retail remains Dior’s sales driver. Anderson’s comprehensive approach, overseeing all fashion collections, supports the effort to build a unified—and universal—Dior world.
Anderson arrives at the boutique’s top-floor terrace and lounge at 7:25 p.m. The guest list is, for a fashion dinner, eccentric and interesting. “It was the kind of gathering that really speaks to Jonathan and his mind,” says Greta Lee, who attended in a simple, elegant gray Dior blouse and jeans. “His ideas and choices are often unexpected, and the breadth of what he cares about is genuinely interesting.” Jennifer Lawrence comes with her husband, and longtime Dior ambassador Charlize Theron arrives last. Also present are Gia Coppola, Maude Apatow, and Ejae, the voice star of KPop Demon Hunters. Lauren Sánchez Bezos takes selfies and gives hugs. Mike White, creator of The White Lotus, is there, apparently to his own surprise, dressed by Dior in a sweater and wandering around with fascinated alertness, as if taking mental notes. Many of the celebrity ambassadors Anderson has brought to Dior, like Lee, are longtime collaborators who bring a quirkier, wittier energy to the traditional French house.
After shaking hands with Delphine Arnault, who also flew in for the occasion, Anderson rushes over to Lee and embraces her. (“For me, she’s not a muse, she’s a friend,” he says. “It’s not just about wearing clothing; it’s, can you have a drink and a three-course meal with that person?”) He wears a pale blue shirt, jeans, and brown moccasins. Waiters carry nori rolls filled with caviar, and tiny onion tarts resemble white folded cranes. On the patio, small cups are filled with Marlboro cigarettes. (When someone remarked to Arnault that this wasn’t very LA, she joked that it was very LA—in the 1980s.) By ten past the hour, guests are seated, and the dinner takes on a happy wildness. By 9:15, Anderson is leading a group of celebrities to the terrace for a smoke. Half an hour later, he has shots of tequila sent around to everyone; more smoking follows.
“I think moments like this, for any artist, are particularly interesting because they’re moments of transition,” Lee reflects later. It thrilled her to watch Anderson move into a new realm. “The dinner was like that—a moment where things are really brewing.”
In Paris, as the holidays approach, tourists crowd before the twinkling lights of the Dior flagship, taking photographs. Half a block away—directly across the street from the Loewe boutique—The heart of the Dior headquarters is the Dior Heritage archive—a meticulously kept collection of garments, accessories, perfumes, working notes, sketches, patterns, correspondence, and press clippings dating back to the house’s founding, all organized in pristine Dior-gray boxes. While the documents have always remained in-house, the archive has been engaged in a long, ongoing effort to track down and acquire the house’s early couture dresses. Perrine Scherrer, the archive director, showed me an early treasure: an intact Junon dress, often considered Christian Dior’s greatest masterpiece.
When Anderson arrived at Dior, he conducted a broad study of this archive. “I did an exercise with the team where I asked them to bring six looks from every designer who had ever worked here,” he says. (His favorite Christian Dior piece is the ivory-colored Cigale from 1952: “It’s so aerodynamic—the construction is amazing.”) The next day, he visited a new exhibition at the Galerie Dior, the house’s 13-room public museum located half a block from the flagship store. Opened in 2022 beneath one of Dior’s couture ateliers, it now attracts 1,500 visitors daily—half a million a year—with tickets selling out a month in advance. The current exhibition features pieces from the collection of Azzedine Alaïa, who, for obscure reasons, concealed the extent of his Dior collecting during his lifetime, meaning these garments have never been shown before. “The Alaïa Foundation has 600 pieces, and we selected a hundred to feature,” says Olivier Flaviano, the gallery head.
Christian Dior presented his first collection in 1947 and died ten years later, by which time his house employed hundreds of people and operated across five continents. Yves Saint Laurent succeeded him at the age of 21. “Now if a 21-year-old was leading a house of that scale, people would be horrified,” Anderson remarks. “You know what I mean? If we don’t look at the past, we forget how radical it was.”
Flaviano guided us through the exhibition: examples of Dior’s most successful early lines; an exact recreation of the house’s original fitting room; the original in-house exhibition hall, where VIPs are still received; a wall of magazine covers spanning decades; and a photograph of Christian Dior’s office fortune teller along with the charms he carried. “He was extremely superstitious, Monsieur Dior,” Flaviano notes.
“Well, that’s one thing we have in common,” Anderson offered before wandering off to take a call.
In the studio the next evening, Anderson sat staring at his boards, which displayed the upcoming advertising campaign.
“We’ve broken it into different kinds of characters—for me, the biggest thing is that Dior can represent different men, different women, different people. The brand is big enough to not just have one monotype,” Anderson explains. He never thinks about the campaign while designing, but it’s an essential part of his understanding of the work and how it might exist in the world. When planning his first campaign, shot by David Sims, he considered what an “aristocrat”—the original audience for high fashion—might represent in a post-aristocratic age.
“I’m really happy,” Anderson says with uncharacteristic openness, gazing at the boards. He points to a series of photographs of models Laura Kaiser, Saar Mansvelt Beck, and Sunday Rose squeezed together on a love seat. “I just love this,” he says. “There’s a kind of happiness in it. When you go to a party, there’s always the one who’s genuinely having fun, the one who’s trying to have fun, and the one who’s seducing—a good depiction of what this can all be.” He turns to a board centered on soccer player Kylian Mbappé, dressed in jeans, a gray sweater, and a tie in an Eldredge knot. “Then you have this idea of leadership—taking the footballer outside, transporting him. And then you have someone…””Like Greta,” he says, turning to Lee’s board, “you have these two pillars showing how the girl can exist, whether for this age group or that one, and still carry the same energy.”
He crosses his arms. “I’ll sit with this, and twenty other people will have opinions about it, but I think it makes sense,” he declares, allowing himself a relieved smile. “I was so caught up in the anticipation and whether people would like it. But seeing all this, I feel very proud of the teams. I think it was the right direction. Is it the birth of a brand-new language? Not yet. But is it a step forward from where I was in my previous job?” He looks at me with quiet delight. “It’s starting to move,” he says.
For the Annie Leibovitz portraits: grooming by Jillian Halouska. Produced by AL Studio. Set design by Mary Howard.
For the Stef Mitchell fashion photographs: hair by Ryan Mitchell; makeup by Aurore Gibrien; manicurist, Magda S; tailor, Lauryn Trojan. Produced by NILM. Set design by Giovanna Martial. Photo artwork by Martin Depalle.
Frequently Asked Questions
Of course Here is a list of FAQs about Radical Chic Exploring Jonathan Andersons Contemporary Vision for Dior designed to be clear concise and conversational
General Beginner Questions
Q What is Radical Chic in the context of Dior
A Its a term used to describe the unique modern and often intellectual approach of designer Jonathan Anderson It blends Diors classic ultrafeminine heritage with radical contemporary ideaslike unexpected proportions artistic references and a focus on craft
Q Who is Jonathan Anderson
A He is the Creative Director of both his own label JW Anderson and the Spanish luxury house Loewe He is known for his conceptual artdriven designs that challenge traditional fashion norms
Q Is Jonathan Anderson the head designer of Dior
A No he is not Maria Grazia Chiuri is the Creative Director of Diors womens collections Jonathan Andersons vision for Dior is typically explored through special projects exhibitions or critical analysis of how contemporary designers like him are reinterpreting the idea of luxury houses
Q So is Radical Chic an actual Dior collection
A Not exactly Its more of a theme concept or critical lens used to analyze how a modern sensibility can be applied to a historic house like Dior You might see this term used in museum exhibitions fashion criticism or academic discussions
Advanced Conceptual Questions
Q How does Andersons Radical Chic differ from Diors traditional aesthetic
A Traditional Dior is known for the New Look cinched waists full skirts and overt glamour Andersons Radical Chic might deconstruct those silhouettes use humble or unexpected materials and prioritize artistic statement over pure elegance
Q What are some key examples of this Radical Chic vision
A Think of looks that play with volume in odd places mix haute couturelevel craft with seemingly mundane objects or directly reference modern art and sculpture Its about intellectual provocation alongside beauty
Q Whats the benefit of viewing Dior through this contemporary lens
A It keeps the brand relevant and engaged in current