5 things we loved about the Dior Cruise 2027 show Jonathan Anderson’s show takes on a noir feel

The set that yesterday at LACMA hosted the Dior Cruise 2027 show tried to reconstruct a noble past, that of Los Angeles in the 1940s and 1950s with its immortal divas and its pharaonic sets, but through completely modern technologies. A type of reverse engineering work that is also what Jonathan Anderson is doing with the Dior imagery: not starting from the past to reach the present, but almost “reconstructing” from the present and with present-day tools a bridge toward the past.

In this exercise his Dior becomes very Anderson-ian, i.e. surreal in the volumes, almost playful in the way it experiments with materials and silhouettes even though it always tends to brush against the cerebral and the hermetic. A tortuosity of thought in which the cinema icons that inspired the collection tended to get lost (including the quotation of Marlene Dietrich’s jacket in Hitchcock’s Stage Fright, declared as the starting point of the collection) in an avalanche of disparate references that ranged from flowers, to films, to cars, to actresses. Nevertheless, the ideas that Anderson has for his Dior are increasingly on target and collection after collection, always returning to the same silhouette and refining it each time.

Here then are 5 things we loved about the Dior Cruise 2027 show.

The season of flowers

Turning women into bouquets has been one of the main directives of Anderson’s Dior from the very beginning, even at the risk of completely covering them in a single, hyper-stimulating cascade of lily of the valley, bluebells, iris. After last season’s water lilies, Cruise 2027 was dominated by the floral theme of California poppies. A flower, the poppy, interesting because it is an atavistic symbol of sleep and dreams, a fundamental thematic element.

«Christian Dior had understood how important the idea of the “dream” was for people after the war, as a form of escapism», says Anderson in the show notes. «He explored it in haute couture, his surrealist friends were obsessed with dreams and, naturally, Hollywood is the Dream Factory. Everything was part of the same cross-cultural shift». Poppies, moreover, became one of the symbols of the Hollywood myth due to their presence in The Wizard of Oz, perhaps the most iconic film of that era.

The menswear looks

The collection also featured menswear looks. Compared to the womenswear, they moved in a rather different aesthetic, although there were points of connection in the Bar Jacket and in some formal suits. Recurring elements included cloaks, lamé fabrics, pied-de-poule made of strass and very structured coats, but unlike the first collections, oriented toward more aristocratic tastes, in the latest outings Anderson favors a more glam aesthetic, made of leather trousers, studded sneakers, jeans whose tears are held together by chains as Hedi Slimane already did for Saint Laurent’s FW13 in unsuspicious times.

A section of menswear looks instead seemed to draw from more realistic atmospheres, with a series of shirts paired with jeans decorated with artworks by Ed Ruscha, an artist who for Anderson «has this fascinating sense of the everyday and how it connects to the grandeur of this city». The real highlight, however, was a gray wool coat on which the striped light of the shutters was printed, a quotation of classic noir films.

The automobiles

Another “thread” of quotations were American vintage cars. They certainly started from the show invitation: the key of a car that would then return as a charm hanging from the bags. But there was one on the runway that was also a potential reference to John Galliano’s SS95 show, whose work for Dior was quoted in the new Saddle Bags inspired by the bodywork and leather interiors of sports cars and even had a key-shaped pendant. To close the circle of the quotation, the car-inspired Saddle Bags were also an idea previously explored by John Galliano for Dior’s SS01.

Archive asymmetries

Already from the very first collections, Anderson explored the theme of asymmetry through infinite draperies, bias hems and dressing solutions that broke the rigid symmetry of haute couture classicism. In this he recalls the work of Christian Dior himself who, in his ways and in his languages, actually loved to create dramatic silhouettes by disguising them in an elegance that is very high society. Specifically, in this show, a look with an asymmetric jacket and skirt that appeared to be complementary seemed to quote the famous Abandon dress that Dior himself created in 1948, featuring a jacket whose lapel curved asymmetrically across the chest.

Philip Treacy’s feather headdresses

Another element that drew attention in the collection were the feathered headdresses decorating the models’ heads. They were by Philip Treacy, the only milliner since McQueen’s time who creates hats for haute couture, who for these was inspired by a project initially made for Isabella Blow, in which feathers created the word “Blow”, a design very much in line with the delicate taste for the obscene that the English socialite displayed on numerous occasions. Here the words were different, from “Buzz”, to “Flow” to “Star” (although the lettering, if seen quickly, seemed to spell the word “slop”) and obviously “Dior”.