On Wednesday afternoon in Paris, Dior’s AW26 menswear show unfolded as an exercise in reconsideration. Presented by Jonathan Anderson during Paris Fashion Week Men’s, the collection proposed a relationship with history that was neither reverential nor ironic, but interrogative.
The conceptual anchor was the figure of the flâneur: young men moving through Paris without urgency or destination. In Dior’s narrative, they arrive at the house’s Avenue Montaigne boutique and notice a small plaque embedded in the pavement nearby, bearing the name Paul Poiret. Once a neighbour of Dior, Poiret was a designer who rejected rigid structure in favour of fluidity and theatrical freedom, drawing on influences far beyond Europe. The encounter, imagined as incidental rather than staged, becomes the point at which the past intrudes on the present.
Poiret’s legacy is a charged one. He represents both liberation from convention and a form of opulence rooted in early 20th-century excess. Anderson did not attempt to recreate his silhouettes. Instead, he treated Poiret as an intellectual reference – a reminder that elegance can be expansive, mobile and unafraid of contradiction.
That sensibility shaped a collection built on tension. Precision tailoring formed its backbone: elongated jackets, narrow trousers, cropped Bar silhouettes and sharply reduced blazers. These were counterbalanced by denim, parkas and technical outerwear, eroding the hierarchy between formal and informal dress. The effect was not chaotic but deliberate, as if each look were negotiating its own internal logic.
Materials added further complexity. Donegal tweeds, velvets, jacquards and dense embroidery lent gravity to a predominantly dark palette, while styling choices – yellow spiked hair, ornamental epaulettes – introduced moments of cultivated eccentricity. Gender distinctions were softened rather than erased, with silhouettes that moved easily across traditional boundaries without theatrical insistence.
Anderson approached dress as a language – something that can argue, question and reflect. Luxury, in this context, was not defined by restraint or excess, but by discernment: an ability to hold disparate references in productive tension.
The invocation of Poiret inevitably raises questions about how fashion engages with its own history, particularly when that history is shaped by cultural appropriation as well as innovation. Anderson’s strategy -abstraction rather than quotation – suggests an awareness of those complexities, even if they remain unresolved.
