As Paris Fashion Week opened on Monday, rumours were circulating that Irish fashion star Jonathan Anderson is set to be appointed as the next creative director of the French luxury goods giant Dior.
Mr Anderson, a son of former Irish rugby international Willie Anderson, recently withdrew from Spanish luxury brand Loewe and from showing his eponymous brand at London Fashion Week.
Under his stewardship from 2014 to 2024, the sleepy Spanish luxury brand whose sales in 1996 hovered around $2 million, was revived and turned into a global $2 billion business.
Mr Anderson (41) is from Magherafelt in Co Derry. He started his career in London before LVMH invested in his company and appointed him creative director of Loewe in 2014. He was voted one of Time magazine’s most influential people of the year in 2024 and has won many awards.
According to well-placed industry sources, Mr Anderson and his team were in Dior headquarters on Avenue Montaigne three months ago. They also say that this collection will be the last from Maria Grazia Chiuri at Dior, though official press contacts noted that the designer is currently working on three future collections for the house and will be presenting a documentary to mark International Women’s Day on Saturday.
Dior’s AW25 collection spearheaded a line-up of 72 shows and 37 presentations this week at the Paris show.
Ms Chuiri’s tenure, since her debut collection for Dior in 2016 as the brand’s first female director, has been a successful one. A jewel in the crown of LVMH’s 16 brands, a recent report by HSBC estimated that revenues at Dior almost quadrupled from €2.7 billion in 2018 to more than €9 billion in 2023.
But given the current slowdown in the luxury sector, growth has levelled off and women’s wear is now under pressure “and designs at Dior have become a bit stale and repetitive”, according to the HSBC report.
The autumn/winter show held in the Tuileries Gardens, where huge crowds thronged the entrance, was a tour de force both in terms of the clothes and their dramatic staging.
Inspired by Virginia Woolf’s binary blurring fictional biography Orlando, the Dior collection highlighted the transformative power of fashion – from cobwebby and slashed lace dresses, golden trouser suits, shaggy coats and sweeping cassocks to gowns with ruffled collars, brocaded corsetry, white shirts, lambskin capes and J’Adore logo T-shirts.
Zipped gladiator boots and jaunty black berets added to the flamboyant mix. “A repertoire of possibilities,” was how Ms Chiuri described it.
