Rihanna, Jennifer Lawrence and a Paris runway full of bras: Dior comes undone in mist

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PARIS (AP) — Rihanna, Jennifer Lawrence, Rosalía and Cynthia Erivo watched from the front row Tuesday as Dior's Jonathan Anderson showed 65 spring looks on a runway stretched across a pond in the Tuileries Garden — a collection built on the idea that the most expensive way to get dressed is to stop halfway.

Trees rose from the water and fog drifted over the models — artificial mist pumped out on an afternoon when Paris hit 82 degrees Fahrenheit (28 degrees Celsius).

The opening look set the terms: a white pinstriped double-breasted jacket over a striped shirt and a short cream skirt, nothing tucked, nothing fastened with conviction.

Bras showed beneath open jackets, shirts were buttoned unevenly and pajama piping ran along the edges of tailoring.

Even the hems looked windswept before the wind arrived.

It was a long way from the house Christian Dior founded in 1946 and made famous a year later with the New Look: the Bar jacket, waist pulled tight, skirt swallowing yards of fabric.

Anderson, who took over in 2025 as the first designer since Dior himself to handle womenswear, menswear and couture, has been turning it into the "loose look" ever since.

The show notes framed this season as a question — “how light can a dress be?” — and answered it by treating tailoring like drapery.

Bar jackets went soft, their peplums — the flounce at a jacket’s waist — slumped rather than sculpted; one was crossed with a barn coat.

Houndstooth, a house classic, dissolved into sheer chiffon.

The 1952 La Cigale dress returned in strapless pink pleated tulle, flaring at the hips like the cicada it is named for.

Archive pieces, the notes promised, would be “articulated in new ways.” Mostly they were.

It was deliberate dishevelment, a mood running through the whole fashion month, at Prada and elsewhere.

Luxury hid in the seams — Murano glass buttons, faux fur under a lapel, visible only when the collar is popped — while spectacle sat in plain sight: jackets and miniskirts covered in hundreds of hand-cut petals that shivered as models walked.

Bronze, silver and mint-green trousers cut through a palette of black, white and gray.

The saddle bag, a hit of the John Galliano years, is back.

The invitation came with a pair of wenwan walnuts, traditionally rolled in the palm for years until they develop a polish — beauty through handling, a fitting metaphor for clothes this crumpled.

It also pointed to the collection’s weakness. This was Anderson’s 10th Dior outing in barely more than a year, and its silhouette — the ballooning chiffon mini, the see-through tailoring, the single dangling earring — is by now familiar before the first model appears.

Fashion’s oldest trick is surprise — and Anderson’s is refinement, which sells.

Whether it is what fashion wants from Dior is a question the fog could not hide.

“Long before a tree unfurls its branches toward the sky,” the notes said, “the walnut holds the knowledge of its own form.”

Ten collections in, the same is true of Anderson’s Dior: either a house that has found itself, or one that has stopped looking.