Jonathan Anderson Brings Nature to the Dior Haute Couture Runway

“When you copy nature, you always learn something. Nature offers no fixed conclusions, only systems in motion – evolving, adapting, enduring. Haute couture belongs to this same logic: a laboratory of ideas where experimentation is inseparable from craft, and time-honoured techniques are activated as living knowledge. It is a way of seeing – an interpretive lens through which the present is examined, reassembled and imagined anew. Urgent. Subtle. Precise,” says Maison Dior.

For his first couture collection, Dior Creative Director Jonathan Anderson approaches couture as a collector, gathering objects that spark emotion and weaving them into an abstract tapestry. Constructed like a wunderkammer, the collection becomes a cabinet of wonders, where marvellous artefacts and natural forms coexist for private contemplation.

Nature meets artifice, the old welcomes the new. Cyclamen bouquets, gifted by John Galliano to Anderson before his debut show for the House, act as poetic symbols of creative continuity, while the anthropomorphic ceramics of Magdalene Odundo inform sculptural silhouettes. Lines flow sinuously across structured shapes or drape gently around the body, magnifying curves and gestures. A new grammar of form emerges, expanding the language of the House while echoing its foundations.

Handwork transforms the micro into the macro: flowers are cut from silks or condensed into dense embroideries, textured threads handwoven into speckled tweed, and nets layer veil-like over ballooning volumes. Knitwear enters the couture lexicon, celebrating manual dexterity and experimentation. Accessories are conceived as unique artefacts – from moulded handbags to transformed found materials – each piece a small wonder.

To wear couture is to collect it, and to carry forward – with empathy – the mindset that created it.