When Jonathan Anderson visits Christian Dior’s extensive archive, known as Dior Heritage, he looks not only for inspiration in the form of a button, textile swatch, or cut, but for traces of Monsieur Dior himself. He finds them in garments, of course, but also in the Frenchman’s biography, his business sense, biography, sketches, and superstitions.
In this installment of Vogue’s Objects of Affection series, the designer shares some of his discoveries. The video also inadvertently reveals commonalities between the house founder and its creative director. The way Anderson speaks of M. Dior, as “a bit of an alchemist because he looks back to be able to reconstruct the future,” is how many people speak of the Irishman.
La Cigale, an architectural dress from 1952 with a skirt that juts out in four points is Anderson’s favorite Dior design, but his tour of the history of Dior starts, almost by default, with the Bar Suit of 1947, the foundation around which the look, and the business, of the house has been built over decades. Anderson shows how a parka designed by John Galliano—which he says he’d wear with jeans and boots to walk to work—borrows pockets from the Arizona coat of 1948. Anderson is the house’s seventh creative director post M. Dior and his take on the history of the brand is that “It’s like great cinema. It has everything in it, ups and downs, it has had multiple cast and crew. It reinvents itself.”
Director: Nikki Petersen
Director of Photography: Etienne Baussan
Editor: Katie Wolford
Producers: Chase Lewis, Amaury Delcambre
Associate Producer: Lea Donenberg
Gaffer: Adam Pelle
Audio: Colin Larchet
Production Coordinator: Tanía Jones
Production Manager: Kristen Helmick, Evie Roop
Line Producer: Natasha Soto-Albors
Assistant Editor: Fynn Lithgow
Post Production Coordinator: Holly Frew
Supervising Editor: Kameron Key
Post Production Supervisor: Alexa Deutsch
Executive Producer: Rahel Gebreyes
Senior Director, Video: Romy van den Broeke
Senior Director, Programming: Linda Gittleson
VP, Video Programming: Thespena Guatieri
