PARIS — “If someone had asked me about a year and a half ago about couture, I would have probably been nonchalant and said something like, ‘Well, I think it’s irrelevant,’ or something,” says Jonathan Anderson. “I never really understood the glamour behind it.”
“Now, I feel like I’m doing a PhD in couture. Every day you are learning the process of something that has been done for so long in France. It is a kind of an institution in itself.”
It’s Dec. 16, 2025 and Anderson, just nine months into his role as Christian Dior’s new designer, is readying his first haute couture collection for the storied French fashion house. That goes some way towards explaining why, while much of the fashion world is already winding down for the Christmas holidays, Anderson is working right until the end.
A week earlier, Anderson had texted me saying he wanted to show me how he is “changing couture at Dior.” I was intrigued, and amid his couture fittings, working on show soundtracks with Frédéric Sanchez, planning his first product drop and preparations for his second Dior menswear show, we found two hours to dive into his thinking behind his first couture outing.
Since the beginning of the year, Anderson has been a fixture of the fashion news cycle. The merchandising and pricing of his first drop were analysed ad nauseam online. His red-carpet looks on Jessie Buckley and Priyanka Chopra at the Golden Globes elicited both plaudits and brickbats. And just last week, his sophomore menswear collection polarised online viewers and the wider industry. But his couture debut, set to take place on Monday at the Musée Rodin in Paris, is perhaps the most anticipated moment so far of Anderson’s bid to reenergise Dior.
It’s a high-stakes show for the brand, LVMH’s second biggest, which was hit hard by the slowdown in luxury demand. That’s in part because haute couture is so critical to the house — not only to its origin story, but in the way that, to this day, it’s central to the image that moves billions of euros of goods throughout its product pyramid, from lipsticks and perfumes all the way to handbags and Bar suits. Haute couture sits at the very top.
“There’s probably five or six houses in the world at that scale. It’s intimidating. It’s scary. I feel a bit, as you said, [like an] imposter,” Anderson admits. “I think I’ll still feel intimidated until the show is done.”
“For me, it’s a very emotional process,” he adds, “because I think it’s something that is steeped in history, people who have been working for many, many designers inside this house who are still here. In a weird way, you have to go into performative mode that, ‘Yes, I can do this,’ and at the same time being like, ‘I’m totally confused.’”
Despite pangs of imposter syndrome, Anderson has developed a novel proposition for Dior couture, both creatively and commercially, expanding the offering with everything from jewellery made from meteorites to handbags upcycled from 18th-century fabrics, and introducing new ways for couture clients and the wider public to experience and understand the artisanship that underpins the historic craft he now feels he is responsible for preserving.
“Dior couture needs to exist because they are practising a skill that if we don’t practise, would disappear,” he says.
‘A Mindset, a Mythology and Making With Hand’
Anderson started working on the men’s side of Dior last March, but it wasn’t until his predecessor on the women’s side of the company, Maria Grazia Chiuri, officially exited the house at the end of May that he could step into Dior’s storied couture ateliers.
There he encountered a “mini-city” of highly specialised expertise: fragile, expensive to sustain and, in Dior’s case, central to how the house justifies its position at the very top of luxury.
“Somebody does flou. Only does flou. There is no cross-pollination. It’s like the cheese shop and the butcher, that’s their little area,” he says. “They take on a look, and they look after this look through the entire process.”
“There’s rules, there’s so many different things you can and cannot do, and I was trying to work out how do I approach that,” he continues. “I found it very difficult to relate to until they did one dress, and then I was like, ‘Okay, I’m kind of addicted.’”
The deeper he went, the more his understanding of couture shifted away from “glamour” and towards that sense of responsibility to preserve a deep well of knowledge and craft that can only survive if it is constantly exercised.
“Couture is kind of like an endangered craft, a kind of mindset, a mythology and making with hand,” Anderson says.
The designer is no stranger to high-end craft. During his 10-year tenure at LVMH stablemate Loewe, he made craft central to his proposition — celebrating leather artisans, launching an annual craft prize and pushing the ateliers and factories to new heights with his quirky designs. Over at his namesake JW Anderson brand, remodeled last summer, craft is at the heart of the new business strategy.
But couture-level craftsmanship at a megabrand like Dior is something else altogether, sitting somewhere between dream-making and engineering: a place where new ideas can be formed, tested and refined.
“They’re able to do anything. There’s never ‘no,’” he says. “It’s really like cars. It’s like, here is an archetype for a brand-new car, and it may never be able to go on the road, but we are going to make it happen.”
“And that’s where I think you can start to cross-pollinate a language,” he says.
This understanding has also shaped operational decisions. Instead of doing the various womenswear collections sequentially, Anderson is designing couture on a six-month development cycle, giving it the time required to function as a true laboratory that can inform the other collections he is working on simultaneously.
“I cannot do a couture show in 30 days. It’s just impossible,” he says. “Couture is a backbone,” he adds — anchoring not just the house’s creativity, but its pace and standards.
Starting Points
Anderson’s starting point for his first couture collection came from a long-standing creative relationship with a contemporary artist who helped him think about couture as form rather than image.
“One of my dearest friends is Magdalene Odundo, who I have worked with many times. Her vessels for me are the idea of form and silhouette. She always jokes that for her, that vase is like Naomi Campbell,” he says, gesturing to a photo of an Odundo vase on the mood board. “And I was like, ‘What is a dress that is a vase that ultimately is Naomi Campbell?’”
Anderson is not talking about an aesthetic reference or mood, but about how an object becomes a body — and how a body animates an object.
The look that opens Monday’s show is a swirl of pleated fabric. “I like the idea that it was pleated and it looked like it was being spun like the movement of clay as you build it,” he says. “When I saw the toile, I was like, ‘Okay, we have to open the womenswear show with a kind of shorter version of it.’ This is why Dior is Dior.”
If, on the surface, Anderson’s couture opener resembles the opening look from his ready-to-wear show in October, the internal construction is miles apart.
“The one in couture, you have these tiny lines of tulle that are gathered, which make this kind of candy floss,” he says, flipping the dress over. “And they build this very, very light structure which holds the shape so that you can push it in, and then it has memory. Here, everything is pleated by hand onto the carcass and then stitched down to keep the shape.”
“What people forget in couture is that everything is done by hand,” he says. “What has taken me a bit of time to get used to is that by doing things by hand, things become a lot rounder. The seam is a lot rounder, it’s less flat.”
That physical difference is where he locates the distinction between couture and everything else.
“Couture is going to be like a lab,” he says. “How do we learn from this and take it elsewhere in the company?”
New Couture for New Clients
Historically, couture at Dior has mostly focused on the gowns and dresses. Anderson wanted to expand the offering with jewellery, bags and shoes, each developed with the same seriousness and quality as a couture gown, building a pyramid of couture products at the top of the company’s wider pyramid of goods.
“When I was younger, I was obsessed by Jean Paul Gaultier,” Anderson says. “When he would do a couture show, it was like an entire theme. You nearly had to buy the entire look to get the vibe.”
Anderson is not rejecting that model outright, but he is deliberately loosening it by offering a sort of modularity — the idea that couture can operate as a system of objects rather than as a single, all-or-nothing proposition.
“There’s a way that you can enter couture on different levels,” he explains. “Some people don’t want an entire dress. Some people want to have an object.”
In bags, couture is a space for upcycling and prototyping.
“What is upcycling in a Dior way?” he asks, picking up a bag with a Lady Dior shape covered in a vintage, 18th-century French fabric. “Each bag comes with a list of components. Fabrics that were made in France that you cannot make any longer. So we’re sourcing them, then reconditioning them, then reembroidering and then reassembling them,” he explains.
Pointing to a new oversized Dior Saddle bag in a sumptuous black leather with oversized rivets, he says: “It’s about looking at mechanisms, things that are more like a prototyping stage — maybe like cars would do.”
A version of that bag could easily make its way into the main collection. “I think it’s a nice way to have a lab for bags. I’ve been trying to work out what kind of actions that can have. It might not resolve into doing 10,000 of them, but you can then work out a way. ‘Okay, this is the toile, now let’s take it into something.’”
For jewellery, Anderson has leaned into found objects and unusual materials. “We have fossils that are then cast into it, or meteorites, or old Roman cameos. Each has this idea of, like, how do we make the old new?”
And shoes are treated as an engineering project, he says, referencing a lineage of heel design that stretches back to Roger Vivier, who acted as the shoe designer for Christian Dior’s haute couture collections in the 1950s and is credited with introducing the stiletto.
“We start exploring how we do shoes and new types of making of shoes. Experimenting with new shoes, toe shapes and flexibility,” Anderson explains. “We make the lasts from scratch.”
All of this ladders up to the same strategic point: couture as a world you can experience in more than one way, at different levels and price points, recognising that participation can take different forms — collecting, wearing, commissioning, engaging — and building a structure that accommodates that complexity.
Anderson also has new plans for engaging clients and the broader public.
He says existing clients tend to fall into familiar patterns: those who commission couture for specific occasions, and those who collect it as part of a broader engagement with fashion history. But Anderson is equally interested in attracting new clients to couture.
“It’s about being part of a world,” he says. The runway is not the culmination of couture, but just the starting point, an introduction.
This season, the purpose-built show venue at the Musée Rodin that first hosted the Dior Homme show last Wednesday will be shapeshifted into a couture show space on Monday, and then transformed into a public exhibition space on Tuesday — an approach that both reflects a desire for more efficiency and also opens up couture to a wider audience.
“We’re trying to work out how we can do this in a more responsible way,” Anderson says.
The exhibition is about proximity, education and transparency — allowing the public and clients to move beyond fantasy and into tangible understanding.
“We’re going to open it for the entire week. You can go for free. And we’re going to do a talks program, and we’re going to do school groups from all parts of France. It will be an exhibition which will be the work of Magdalene Odundo, several looks from the couture show and historical looks of Christian Dior.”
After the show is over, clients will also be able to encounter garments up close at the private Villa Dior. “The client will be able to see every single component,” he says.
Back in the summer, as Anderson finalised preparations for his ready-to-wear debut, he invited former Dior creative director John Galliano to see his work.
“When I was at university, he was like a hero,” Anderson says. “And he is Dior in the public imagination, still to this day.”
Galliano arrived with wild cyclamen flowers and sweets from Tesco for the team — a gesture Anderson describes as deeply emotional, and one which has found its way into a recurring motif in the collection and the couture show invitation.
“The one line that he said was, ‘The more that you love Dior, the more it will give you back,’” Anderson recalls.
He pauses, then adds: “I think it’s the more that you love the people in it, the more that you give into it, the more it will give you, it will tell you what to do.”
Tune in later today for a special episode of The BoF Podcast for Imran Amed’s full interview with Jonathan Anderson.
Disclosure: LVMH is part of a group of investors who, together, hold a minority interest in The Business of Fashion. All investors have signed shareholders’ documentation guaranteeing BoF’s complete editorial independence.
