The house of Dior has a longstanding relationship with cinema—Christian Dior was a filmic dreamer. He designed the French Second Empire costumes for the 1942 movie Le Lit à Colonnes, while working for couturier Lucien Lelong, before he founded his own label in 1946. It was those romantic, structured silhouettes that would bolster the New Look. In 1955, he was nominated for an Academy Award for his costuming of Terminal Station, and in 1950, he designed for the pre–New Wave Les Enfants Terribles and Alfred Hitchcock’s Stage Fright, in which he dressed Marlene Dietrich. These served as Anderson’s initial inspiration. “No Dior, no Dietrich!” Golden Age icon Dietrich told Hitchcock and Warner Bros execs during negotiations for her part as the sultry, glamorous Charlotte Inwood.
“Christian Dior understood how important the idea of ‘the dream’ was for people after the war,” notes Anderson. From the ateliers to the lot, “it was all part of the same cross-cultural shift.”
The designer teased a forthcoming cinematic project (projects?) in a preview of the resort collection. “What you’re seeing here,” Anderson told Sarah Mower, “is part of a kind of broader picture of what we will do over the next 12 months in cinema. We’re in Hollywood, and we’re starting something, but it will be a larger picture thing that we will do with franchises, with film, with other things. So this is going to be like: How does a fashion house work with cinema? And how does the cinema work with a fashion house, and what is a new type of business model within that?”
Anderson has made all the right moves toward Hollywood power playing so far while juggling his creative directorship at Dior and his own namesake brand. Costume design is already a side hustle, having worked on friend and director Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers (2024), Queer (2024), and the forthcoming film Artificial. (Anderson hails from Northern Ireland, a region with its own lively film industry and the location for many a Hollywood film and HBO series.)
Challengers was defined by Anderson’s unique understanding of everyday clothes—Zendaya’s “I TOLD YA” tee is a moment that sartorially articulates her character’s growing ambition. Queer, meanwhile, paid particular attention to historical detail, with Anderson diligently making sure garments were timely and likely to have been found worn by drug-spangled gay expats in 1950s Mexico City.
Photo: Les Flappers
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