Jonathan Anderson made his most significant statement yet as Dior’s creative director on Wednesday night, showing the house’s Cruise 2027 collection at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in a show that felt less like a pitch than a love letter to the California legends.
Guests sat on LACMA’s courtyard among the curvy, monolithic cement walls, street lamps and vintage convertibles, the bass line from Air’s “Sexy Boy” bouncing off the hard concrete while convertible headlights washed over the shiny capes and metallic knits. The venue—the newly opened David Geffen gallery at LACMA, designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Peter Zumthor—was itself a statement of intent, a collision of fashion, art, and architecture that announced Anderson as a designer playing a very different game than his predecessors.
The front row reads like a Hollywood power grid. Miley Cyrus, Sabrina Carpenter, Miles Teller, and Anya Taylor-Joy posed for photos upon their arrival, and were joined by Mickie Madison, Tracee Ellis Ross, Macaulay Culkin, Taylor Russell, Miranda Kerr, and Keith Stanfield, along with a slew of top industry executives, like Amazon’s Sue Kroll, Legendary’s Blair Rich, UT’s Dan Constable, and producer Brian. Grazer.
Al Pacino, Jeff Goldblum, Leslie Mann, Maude Apatow, Gia Coppola, Lauren Hutton, and Dior CEO Delphine Arnault assembled a crowd that underscored the house’s deliberate strategy of blurring the lines between fashion and Hollywood royalty. Carpenter wore a yellow ruffled dress from the same collection, Taylor-Joy wore a little black dress, and Cyrus, newly blonde, kept it distinctly casual in jeans over denim.
The fashion house provided everyone with small blankets from Dior to protect them from the cold.
Jonathan Anderson
On the runway, Anderson evoked a Los Angeles that is equal parts glamorous and shadowy. An endless parade of 75 models evoked the looks of Hollywood icons – Marilyn Monroe, Sophia Loren, Audrey Hepburn – in shimmering, fringed and layered designs, off-the-shoulder silhouettes and ruffled scarves, while in menswear, the focus shifted to sharp geometric shades and gray wool flannel reminiscent of the film noir genre.
Some models wore dramatic feather hats bearing the word “Dior” in large, stylized letters, adding a playful architectural touch, while others arrived in a buttercup-yellow dress embellished with roses or a gown of layered orange ruffles inspired by the California poppy, the state flower.
The afterparty at the Chateau Marmont, which was equally fashionable, was filled with her own models — like Miranda Kerr — along with legions of other young Hollywood fashionistas. In fact, the place was so packed, with dancing bodies spilling out of the lobby, that some guests — like Jeff Goldblum and Tracee Ellis Ross — dropped out early.
For Anderson, the night was his most realized argument yet, as the house he now runs — the first designer to oversee all of Dior’s departments since Monsieur Dior himself — is ready for something truly new.
