PARIS (AP) — Dior turned the Musée Rodin into a celebrity waiting room — then into a garden — on the first day of Paris Couture Week.
Guests packed into the museum as the start time for the show drifted.
French first lady Brigitte Macron arrived. Lauren Sánchez Bezos swept in. Parker Posey twirled in her trench-dress.
And then the whole room, celebrities and editors alike, sat and waited for Rihanna.
When the pop-star finally took her seat, the lights dropped on a suspended ceiling hung with a garden of flowers.
Gravity did its quiet work: a bloom loosened and fell to the floor.
It was a fitting opening image for Jonathan Anderson’s first Dior haute couture show: beauty under pressure.
Anderson, the Northern Irish designer who revived Loewe with craft and wit, is now doing something Dior has never asked of one person in the modern era: he commands menswear, womenswear and couture at once.
That scale matters.
Dior is one of the main engines of the luxury conglomerate LVMH, and couture is where a house shows its power.
The collection was pitched as “nature in motion,” with technique treated as living knowledge, not museum display. Anderson followed that logic, reworking fragments of the past into something meant to feel new.
From the start, the palette was disciplined — blacks, whites and ecru — then punctured by flashes of color and texture. Lines were clean. Draping softened, then snapped back into structure: archetypal couture.
At its best, Anderson’s couture had the crispness he has already shown in menswear, and previously at Loewe.
A sublime silken Asian-style coat, strict and elegant, was cut through with black lapels that felt archive-meets-modern.
The house’s history appeared not as costume but as distortion.
The show’s oddest and most telling jokes were the pannier gowns: 18th-century volume reimagined as a take on a fanny pack silhouette.
It was classic Anderson: take something precious, tilt it, and make the result feel both witty and exact. Micro became macro — flowers cut from light silks, dense embroideries, chiffon and organza layered like feathers.
He also nodded to a broader Dior lineage without leaning on nostalgia.
Dior cited bunches of cyclamen given to Anderson by its former creative director John Galliano, and the show carried a faint echo of Galliano-style spectacle — filtered through Anderson’s cooler, more controlled hand.
Hydrangea-like blooms appeared as oversized earrings throughout, a decorative flourish, but one that felt like Dior’s house codes pushing him toward embellishment.
For all the ambition, the accomplished show occasionally felt like a set of strong parts still settling into a single, defining line.
Couture raises the stakes. When it works, it doesn’t just impress; it convinces. Anderson’s debut did both — but not always at the same time.
The ceiling garden promised one complete world. At times, the clothes felt like a designer still deciding where that garden begins and ends.
If Dior said it with flowers, Schiaparelli said it with plumes. The painted ceilings of the Petit Palais were made to evoke the Sistine Chapel in a typical imaginative and envelope-pushing couture display — graced by the likes of Sánchez Bezos and her husband Jeff, as well as Demi Moore. It was plumes, horns and lots of celebrity.
Designer Daniel Roseberry framed the collection as a push from “thinking” to “feeling,” and the clothes followed suit: sharp-shouldered “Elsa” jackets with gravity-defying hips, bustiers that seemed molded like armor, and skirts that bloomed in smoky sfumato tulle from nude to black.
There were creatures everywhere — bird heads, scorpion tails, snake teeth and she-scorpion looks that turned lingerie into couture theater.
Technique did the heavy lifting: bas-relief lace bouquets mounted on tulle, trompe l’oeil animal tails, and showpieces that reportedly took thousands of hours — including one with 65,000 handset feathers.
The keyhole motif — a Schiaparelli signature — returned as jewelry and hardware, a wink at mystery amid the meticulousness.
At its best, the collection balanced menace with beauty, making couture feel like fantasy built on discipline.
At other moments, the exuberance nearly tipped into costume, a victim of its own enthusiasm, as if every idea had to arrive at full volume.
Still, as an opening salvo for couture week, Schiaparelli made the message clear: this season, subtlety can wait.
