Dior and A24 are collaborating, and Sabrina Carpenter is involved somehow The French Maison has kicked off a two-year partnership with the American production house

The Venn diagram encompassing Dior under Jonathan Anderson, A24, and Sabrina Carpenter overlaps in strange ways. Or at least that's how it seemed until yesterday, when the Maison posted a cryptic video on social media showing the pop star and the creative director walking on two treadmills dressed in virtually identical outfits: an unbuttoned flannel shirt, white t-shirt, jeans, and Salomon sneakers — what has become, over recent months, a kind of unofficial Anderson uniform. The post, shared by the accounts of Dior, Anderson, and A24, was merely a teaser, however.

This morning, the Financial Times revealed that Dior and A24 have launched a two-year partnership centred on the Cherry Lane Theatre in New York, the historic theatre acquired by the production company in 2023. Dior will become its main partner, supporting a programme that will include films, theatre, talks, and live events. The deal appears designed to bring Dior into the cultural ecosystem built by A24, allowing the Maison to speak to a younger audience through content and experiences that go beyond a traditional campaign or yet another merch drop from the production house.

What will the Dior and A24 partnership look like?

The collaboration didn't come out of nowhere. Jonathan Anderson met Rose Garnett, head of A24 UK, while working on the costumes for Queer by Luca Guadagnino, and the two have since been exploring a different way of bringing fashion and cinema into dialogue. "Dior has always had a connection with theatre and cinema," Anderson told the Financial Times, but according to the designer, the way these worlds have communicated up to now is no longer enough. The heart of the partnership will therefore be the Cherry Lane Theatre, of which Dior will become the main partner for two years.

The goal, however, does not appear to be turning the theatre into one giant Dior advertisement, but rather building a credible cultural presence and reaching a younger generation through A24 and its community. Dior will also be able to amplify and support certain films and specific projects from the production house, while the theatre will serve as a kind of laboratory for exploring what forms this relationship might take. It's a need Anderson sums up by stating that "fashion is not part of the cultural public imagination at the moment," which is why, he says, the industry must diversify and find its way back into the cultural zeitgeist.

"Nothing's gonna save us, not even Fashion or Film"

In recent years, fashion has begun to look to cinema with an attention that goes well beyond costumes and red carpets. Saint Laurent founded Saint Laurent Productions in 2024, Dior is stepping directly into the A24 universe, and in the meantime, the way designers and collections are presented has also begun to look increasingly like the way the film industry launches a movie. New creative directors get teasers and trailers; campaigns become short films, as in the case of Maison Margiela, which will present a new documentary alongside its upcoming SS27 collection.

Perhaps the point isn't even that fashion has suddenly discovered cinema. It's that, right now, cinema possesses something that fashion seems to lack. It continues to produce stories and images capable of entering popular culture without necessarily having to sell something at the same time. Fashion, by contrast, has in recent years progressively reduced its relationship with the public to a transaction: buy this, desire that, aspire to afford the next thing. What remains to be seen is what will happen when two industries that both want to occupy the cultural imagination start to resemble each other more and more: will fashion manage to claim a share of cinema's cultural relevance, or will cinema end up definitively absorbing a fashion world that no longer quite knows how to speak to people?