Dior's Jonathan Anderson Unveils Couture Collection Inspired by Lynda Benglis

The one person in the fashion industry who doesn’t want to talk about Taylor Swift’s as-yet-unrevealed wedding dress is the man who actually knows what it looks like. “It was a big honour,” was all that Dior’s Jonathan Anderson would say about dressing America’s de facto royal wedding. “But no, I can’t tell you anything about it. It will all come out in due course. It was a joy to work with her and we became very good friends. It is an emotional thing, doing someone’s wedding.”

Instead, Anderson wanted to talk about a very different American artist, sculptor Lynda Benglis, whose sensual slumped hunks of smelted metal inspired his haute couture collection. A wooden pavilion built for the show in the gardens of the Rodin Museum was soundtracked with the flutter of paper fans along the front row, and the haughty silhouettes of couture seemed liquefied in the city heat. A skirt of silver-foiled petals lapped and shimmered like molten lava. A tailored Bar jacket trailed threads of chiffon at the hem like drips of ice-cream down a cone.

This is how haute couture operates. The most exclusive branch of fashion is a high-rolling play for mass-culture eyeballs and a painstaking laboratory for artistic expression in which evening bags are crafted from fragments of 18th-century Indian chintz fabric in a commentary on the enmeshment of decorative traditions across cultures.

Hot on the heels of the coup of dressing Swift, this was a high-concept collection which riffed on how clothing turns fabric into sculpture and included an IYKYK reference to Benglis’ 1974 self-portrait Centrefold, in which she is naked and holding a giant dildo. (Because couture is also a shop window for the wardrobes of billionaires, the Centrefold image was blurred out, to avoid offending potential clients.)

“I think she’s a genius. She was well before her time – before anyone’s time,” Anderson said of Benglis at a preview. He is upholding his predecessor Maria Grazia Chiuri’s tradition of putting female artists at the centre of the Dior world. His debut couture collection, shown in January, was a celebration of the work of ceramicist Magdalene Odundo.

Anderson’s Dior is razzmatazz but with a sideways bent. His strategy of re-energising the grand house with offbeat creative energy is high-risk, but it is working. In the front row Sabrina Carpenter, in a coquettish ivory lace cocktail dress, sat alongside Josh O’Connor in a deconstructed sheer blazer and sequined cravat.

The first look on the catwalk was a floppy satin shirt with black plisse trousers, shrouded in an oversized shearling shawl and topped with an acorn-shaped bonnet: more downtown gallery opening than uptown lunch date. But there was pure glamour, too, in a silver lamé bustier dress knotted with an outsize bow, a delicious cowl-backed peach silk slither of an evening gown, and a sculpted hourglass jacket in silk jacquard embossed with silk ferns.

The finale was a wedding dress, as is traditional at haute couture. The strapless pearl column, veiled in a canopy of hand-pleated chiffon embellished with white feather dandelions and embroidered cactus flowers, was spectacular. But it was not the Dior wedding dress everyone wanted to see.