After months of waiting in the wings, Jonathan Anderson, the Northern Irish designer, has finally been made the sole creative director of Dior, including men’s, women’s and haute couture. The last creative director to command all three was Monsieur Christian Dior himself.
With this new magnified remit, Anderson, who had already been made director of Dior Homme in April this year, takes fashion’s highest accolade. This follows last week's news of Maria Grazia Chiuri stepping down from the position after nine years.
It comes as no surprise, since Jonathan Anderson is the total package. He’s a designer-originator, a marketing maverick, cultural aesthete, accessories genius and works 24/7 - which he will need to do given the 10-plus Dior shows a year alongside those of his own brand, JW Anderson, which he intends to remain head of.
This will make him the busiest man in fashion, akin to the late Karl Lagerfeld.
His appointment at Dior comes off the back of his work for Loewe. For the past 11 years, Anderson masterminded the LVMH-owned Spanish leather brand’s complete transformation. Since 2013, he has been sending out hit after hit bag: the Puzzle, Flamenco, Goya, Hammock, Pebble, Amazona, Squeeze, Paseo and multiple iterations on the humble Basket. Bag hits are the holy grail of any luxury brand. And let’s not forget he has been equally prodigious in the footwear department: long live the Ballet Runner trainer.
Anderson is, without doubt, a commercial sensation. But saleability is not everything. These days you have to continually seize awareness, relevance and sales with every runway / collection / store / event. You could, then, say his brilliance at Loewe has been in knowing when to serve up the unexpected. Shoe designs resembling broken eggs or deflated balloons; bags resembling elephants and hamsters; jackets and shirts made from sheet metal or the giant floral armoured breastplates. His collections have been anything but predictable.
In the age of 24/7 social influence, it is exactly this kind of constant inventiveness, innovation, surprise and intrigue coupled with commercial clout that Dior will require. And that the industry faithful believe he can deliver. The mind boggles at what he may bring to the iconic Dior Bar jacket, how he might experiment in the haute couture playground, and not least how he could reinvent the entire bag and shoe offering for a younger, cooler global audience – at least, one imagines that will be the aim.
Anderson, now 40, graduated from the London College of Fashion in 2005. He first emerged out of a Dalston studio, furnished with chairs from a skip, with a menswear collection in 2008. Two years later, due to popular demand, he added womenswear. He went on to win both British men’s and womenswear designer of the year at the Fashion Awards in 2015 – unheard of at the time – as well as nailing commercial collaborations with Topshop (which sold out) and Uniqlo (ongoing). At just 29, he collaborated withDonatella Versace on her Versus line, before winning the backing of LVMH chairman, Bernard Arnault, who handed him Loewe.
As Anderson himself told me in an interview with Grazia in September 2019: ‘I never went into this industry to be mediocre – that would be depressing. I went into this industry to be the best.’ He admitted that it wasn’t a very ‘British’ thing for him to say this and acknowledged it could be perceived as arrogant, but said it was this kind of focus which ultimately drives him. ‘It’s like running a marathon; you don’t enter the race if you don’t want to come first.’
For Jonathan Anderson, the pistol just fired on his Dior marathon.
Rebecca Lowthorpe worked as fashion director for Grazia from 2016 to 2019; she is currently Grazia’s acting assistant editor, overseeing fashion and beauty content.