By Aaron Kok - published
It has been a rather fabulous few days to be Dior. First came the cultural jackpot that many other luxury houses dream of: Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce, both in custom designs by Jonathan Anderson for their wedding, sending the internet into a feverish spiral that no marketing deck could ever convincingly engineer. Then, in Paris, Anderson returned to the Musée Rodin with his fall/winter 2026 couture collection and did the more difficult thing: presenting a collection of ideas that refused to coast on romance.
Instead, he turned the Dior atelier into a studio, or more precisely, a laboratory. The starting point was American sculptor Lynda Benglis, whose work often begins with flat materials before they are manipulated into volume through pleating, knotting, pouring and moulding. It is an almost too-perfect proposition for couture, where cloth is never merely cloth, and a dress only becomes fully alive once it negotiates with the body.
Related article: Slim Sneakers Are Trending, But Are They Comfy? A BAZAAR Editor Finds Out
For Anderson and company, that negotiation began with the Bar jacket, fashion’s most famous wasp-waisted silhouette and therefore Anderson’s most unavoidable inheritance. Here, he sought to loosen its grip with the old discipline of nipped tailoring being softened into drape, fringe and bias-cut ease. A fern-green tweed jacket came with a sense of movement at its edges, while a speckled grey version seemed to dissolve into a pale chiffon hem, as though the New Look had been caught on a bad television signal and made strange and interesting to look at again. Elsewhere, black jackets with frilled edges were paired with white plissé trousers, replacing bourgeois polish with something slinkier and more offhand.
The strongest pieces were the ones that appeared to have been caught mid-transformation. Silver pleats burst from the body in sharp, fan-like arcs, while lamé was knotted and pulled into sculptural tension. Checked suiting found its pace in a lightened and twisted form until it had almost forgotten its menswear origins. One could see Anderson enjoying the irony of Dior: how does one honour a house built on form without letting form become furniture? His answer was to make the clothes look handled: pressed, wrapped, tugged, coaxed. Does that still count as couture? Yes, even better now that it comes with fingerprints.
Benglis’s presence was most vivid in the surfaces. Metallics gleamed without becoming cold, iridescence shimmered with a slightly fragile beauty, soft silver netting created the illusion of wire fencing, turning a humble material into something elevated. The idea of the sculpture as a thing in flux ran through the collection, particularly in the skirts patched with metallic fabric and veiled in chiffon. They had a scrappy splendour, as if glamour had been assembled from fragments rather than delivered whole.
Related article: Hermès’ New Bond Street Maison Is London’s Latest Fashion Sanctuary
Nature, another perennial Dior subject, arrived through a more intellectual route this time. Anderson looked to the landscapes that have shaped Benglis’ life and work: Ahmedabad in Gujarat, with its abundance and colour, and Santa Fe, New Mexico, with its arid light. That contrast gave the collection its palette and its compelling temperature. There were silvers, whites and greys, but also bursts of peacock brightness, fern greens, cactus tones and saturated floral embroideries, all of which played into a botanical concoction that has plenty of spike.
The peacock-inspired series of designs, each one referencing the birds Benglis encountered in Ahmedabad, became brightly coloured floral and beaded embellishment. The bags were equally persuasive, as the Dior Anthology series continued with Petit Dîner and mini Lady Dior bags covered in antique fragments of 18th-century Indian chintz and indiennes, thus creating a clever bridge between Dior’s decorative instinct and Anderson’s love of found objects. Mother-of-pearl inlays, passementerie and shimmering leathers echoed the clothes, while four shapes were made in collaboration with Benglis, including a metallic plissé Dior Cigale and a Petit Dîner finished with a Benglis-inspired bow.
Related article: 15 White Maxi Skirts To Add To Your Wardrobe
What made the collection compelling was its ability to transcend the usual surface-level fantasy that couture is oft relied upon to deliver. This was not the obvious fairy tale one might have expected after the world’s most watched wedding weekend, yet Anderson’s Dior is chasing a more complex thread of seduction. It wants to be beautiful, but it also wants to think. In lesser hands, that could feel academic. Here, it felt alive, because the clothes kept moving between idea and instinct.
Dior may have had the wedding. With this collection, Anderson made clear he is still more interested in the marriage: between house and artist, archive and hand, sculpture and body, romance and rupture. That is where his couture begins to take shape.