Jonathan Anderson: The Ultimate Art World Fan Boy

PARIS — The first dress Jonathan Anderson ever made was fashioned from handpainted chestnut leaves. It was for his high school diploma in art. He was remembering it as a patchwork mess while he cast his eye over the chiffon and lace wedding dress, beaded with ferns and embroidered with feathered dandelions, that closed his second haute couture show for Christian Dior on Monday. It was a mere four days since he’d dressed the bride and groom for the Swift-Kelce nuptials at Madison Square Garden in New York. He was understandably a tad peaky.

Dior demands a kind of grandeur from its designers. Anderson’s workload is particularly extravagant, and exhaustion is a non-negotiable. Maybe that’s why his latest collection felt like such a pile-on, and also why one of its most striking subtexts was the deliberately rough, unfinished nature of so many of the pieces: lace dresses trailed hems, a white jacket was thick with loose threads, embroidery disintegrated down the skirt of a bar-waisted coat, fluff stuck to another coat, almost as though its wearer had just hiked through a field full of dandelions.

There were metallic bags that squished into any shape you wanted, and scarecrow hats plopped randomly on heads. Anderson pointed out that one of the collection’s leitmotifs — the pleat — needed a synthetic fabric to sustain its pleatedness. “And I like this idea that when you do pleats in couture, you’re not using synthetics, so ultimately it is something which is not forever.” (Although he did add that full couture service meant you could bring your garment back to have it repleated.) There were also silk pieces in the collection, all creased up from being kept in a bag overnight, but those creases would drop out on their own (presumably to be recreased by the customer, if she felt it was necessary to preserve the effect she may feel she’d paid for).

But at the same paradoxical time, there was the finessed rigour that Anderson borrowed from his inspiration, the American sculptor Lynda Benglis, now in her eighties and unable to travel for the show. He insisted she was one of his favourite artists (his other favourite being Magdalene Odundo who motivated his couture debut in January). The fan and the knot were Benglis’ bequest, the first quite literal in actual fans attached to some pieces and less so in the sunray sprays of metallic pleating that dressed others, the second in the bows that disciplined outfit after outfit, from the shearling stole in the first look to the Bar jackets bowed at the waist for a winning new take on the house classic.

Benglis lives between Santa Fe and Kerala, in the south of India, and decorative elements referenced the flora of both places: cacti, ferns, eucalyptus, rhododendrons. Dior’s usual tent in the Musée Rodin would have been stifling in the ongoing heatwave. Anderson tore down the walls, filled the space with ferns and opened it to the museum’s garden, in the spirit of Benglis’ own transcontinental gardens. He scrupulously recreated her recent Barbican exhibition of works on paper stretched over chicken wire in skirts composed of metallic fabric patched over soft silver netting. And — in a bizarre tour de force — Anderson duplicated Benglis’ scandalous cover from Artforum magazine in 1974 for which she satirised the art world patriarchy by posing naked with an enormous dildo. He abstracted the image on a chiffon top, but its underlay was a vintage Fruit of the Loom T-shirt with the original cover, dildo rampant.

It was hard to resist the notion that the subversive wit of all this would have played so much more artfully at Loewe, where Anderson did in fact activate Benglis for the fountains that dressed his men’s show for Spring/Summer 2024. On one level, it’s inspiring to see him applying his innately perverse and deeply personal world view to a beast as big as Dior. On another, you worry about how far he can really take it. Who caves first?

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