Jonathan Anderson’s first accessories for Dior, photographed by Wallpaper*

‘Change is inevitable,’ said Northern Irish designer Jonathan Anderson ahead of his debut womenswear show for Dior, which was held in Paris this past September. Presented amid a gleaming white show set conceived by director Luca Guadagnino and his longtime production designer Stefano Baisi, it was preceded by a film by British filmmaker Adam Curtis, who is best known for his found footage documentaries which explore themes of individualism, progress and power – notably in The Century of the Self, HyperNormalisation, and the recent 2025 series Shifty, which captures the ‘unstable, exciting and frightening’ truths of living in Great Britain at the turn of the milennium.

For the show, in his distinctive style, Curtis mashed up archival clips from the house’s history – and its previous creative directors – alongside shuddering footage from horror movies from the same period. It captured both the thrill and anxiety which underlie a high-profile debut such as this: ‘Dare you enter the house of Dior?’ read its opening title card. ‘Daring to enter the house of Dior requires an empathy with its history, a willingness to decode its language, which is part of the collective imagination, and the resoluteness to put all of it in a box,’ elaborated Anderson in the accompanying collection notes. ‘Not to erase it, but to store it, looking ahead, coming back to bits, traces or entire silhouettes from time to time, like revisiting memories.’

The collection which followed embraced this rationale by ‘recoding’ the house’s archive in the former Loewe designer’s endlessly inventive and oftentimes idiosyncratic style. Classic Dior silhouettes – like the 1947 Bar Suit – were warped and shrunken in proportion, while the bow became a motif throughout, informing the construction of blazers and gowns. Elsewhere, he straddled the theatrical – cornette-style headpieces, dramatic plumes of lace and a bold colour palette – and something more quotidien, like a series of simple denim skirts, plaid shirts and even a riff on the legging. Anderson described it as a ‘tension’ between fantasy and reality, ‘dressing as a way to become a character on the stage that is life’.

In the December 2025 Entertaining Issue of Wallpaper*, Paris-based photographic duo Antoine and Charlie and Wallpaper* fashion and creative director Jason Hughes capture the S/S 2026 collection, with a focus on the accessories. They prove particularly desirable: bunny-shaped ears on a ladylike pump or those adorned with rosette-like flowers, while handbags span the soft (a suede duffle bag adorned with the house’s cannage motif) and the structured, like the folded line of the ‘Dior Cigale’ bag, inspired by the architectural construction of Christian Dior’s 1952 ‘La Cigale’ dress. Others demonstrate the house’s superlative craft: a version of the Lady Dior handbag is adorned with hundreds of tiny green four-leaf clovers, a nod to the house founder’s love of superstitious talismans and iconography.

A version of this article appears in the December 2025 Entertaining Issue of Wallpaper*, available in print on newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News + from 6 November. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today