How Jonathan Anderson Defined Menswear’s New Look

Unlike many famous fashion designers, Anderson doesn’t cloak himself in mystery or eccentricity. Dior has historically attracted its fair share of designers who became larger-than-life personalities (Yves Saint Laurent, John Galliano, Hedi Slimane) while remaining enigmatic and unknowable. Anderson, on the other hand, could pass as a bro, until he opens his mouth and reveals himself as a restlessly curious aficionado of contemporary queer painting, important chairs, and artisanal Japanese ceramics. Still, he dresses in normcore vintage jeans and plain jumpers, as if he is actually the younger brother of a famous fashion designer who only gets a sweater or shirt as a gift every year at Christmas. If you didn’t know who he was, you wouldn’t bat an eye if you saw him buying eggs at your local grocery store.

But now one of the most consistently creative designers in the world is also one of the most powerful designers in the world, tasked with overhauling one of the largest and most famous of fashion houses. Under Kim Jones and Maria Grazia Chiuri, Anderson’s respective predecessors at Dior men’s and women’s, Dior couldn’t swim against the tide of falling spending that has dragged down almost every luxury brand. But Dior is not just any brand. It is a crown jewel of LVMH and an international symbol of French fashion. No single designer since Monsieur Dior himself (as the house’s founder is referred to by everyone at the company besides, seemingly, Anderson, who simply calls the couturier-patriarch “Dior”) has overseen the entire brand at once. Is it too much to expect that Dior under Anderson might usher in the next era of menswear?

The wind may not shift when Anderson enters the room, but when he gets going he’s a commanding talker, speaking in confident brain dump-y monologues that often feel like rhetorical Rube Goldberg machines—one idea knocking the next one forward in an unlikely manner. At the preview, he was wearing a plaid shirt and vintage Levi’s and describing how he has to “decode to recode Dior,” all the while dropping references to Candy Darling, Jean Siméon Chardin, Bram Stoker, 18th–century French furniture, Gerhard Richter, Peter Hujar, and “Dior” himself, in a span of about five minutes. Luca Guadagnino, the Italian director with whom Anderson worked as costume designer on the films Challengers and Queer, popped in and out with a cameraman.

Above, and throughout: Looks from the Dior spring-summer 2026 show in Paris in June.

Courtesy of Dior.

Before starting at Dior in February, Anderson spent a decade in another corner of the LVMH stables, at Loewe, where he created clever and often quite beautiful garments that introduced the wearer to twisted sartorial fantasies. (See: the grass-covered overcoats of spring-summer 2022 or the bedazzled chest-high jeans of spring-summer 2024.) Between Loewe and his experimental namesake line JW Anderson, which he founded in London in 2008, Anderson earned a reputation as a uniquely gifted and prolific talent. But he’s much more curious about what’s around the corner than nostalgic for high points of his past; when he references the past it’s always in service of a new concept. “I think ownership in fashion is the most devastating thing, because I think you do not own anything,” he said. “When you make a creative idea, you put it out. So you come up with another one.”