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This is an edition of the newsletter Show Notes, in which Samuel Hine reports from the front row of the fashion world. Sign up here to get it free.
Skinny jeans and shimmery beaded tops. Reptilian Cuban-heeled boots and cashmere-knit satchels. Dress-length sweaters and polo shirts adorned with spangly epaulets. Cocoon-like couture parkas and bombers. Tiny blazers and cable-knit tailcoats. Velour cargo pants and a fur-lined ski jacket. Lots and lots of bright yellow wigs. On Wednesday of Paris Fashion Week, Jonathan Anderson stuffed all that and more in a cannon and shot it down the Dior runway in a triumphant argument for righteously weird menswear.
“For me, fashion shows are about showing ideas,” Anderson said at a preview of his fall 2026 Dior Men’s collection. And there were a lot of ideas this time around. After a debut that established a baseline of aristo-prep codes and supercharged menswear’s prep renaissance, Anderson’s follow-up felt like a smart but snarling reaction: to rules, to trends, to what we might have thought his Dior would look like.
At a preview, Anderson described the origins of this restless idea of style that jolted Paris Fashion Week. The designer is a master of balancing high concept and desirability, collaging his multifarious curiosities together—from obscure artists to galaxy brain thoughts about things like “formality”—until they cohere into a radical, timely statement.
How Anderson lands on a look is always fascinating, and particularly this season, which convincingly captured the angst of fashion kids who get dressed with the same kaleidoscopic energy that fuels his own creativity. On his mind was a cast of punks putting on various characters by pillaging disparate sartorial traditions—from Christian Dior to French couturier Paul Poiret to the skinny, sleazy silhouette of experimental indie singer-songwriter Mk.gee—and throwing the odd combination together with a flair of DIY formality.
“It's just about instinctive ideas that I feel that I want to kind of explore,” Anderson said. “I don’t want it to end up being a formula. I want to have a bit of fun with it.”
Here’s a breakdown of what was on Anderson’s mental moodboard for the rangy, radical Dior Men’s collection that earned the designer another standing ovation.
Indie rock stars haven’t haunted the halls of Dior since the Hedi Slimane era, so when Anderson invoked the young New Jersey-born experimental guitar star, it felt like someone saying that Cameron Winter was the newest muse of Chanel. And indeed, Mk.gee was all over the show, even if the low-key, long-haired Justin Bieber collaborator didn’t make an appearance himself. Anderson is a self-professed Mk.gee “superfan,” and used two of his records in the show soundtrack. He also borrowed some of Mk.gee’s sleazy style cues, explaining that when they met, the 29-year-old was cocooned in layers of puffers, with a “leaner silhouette on the bottom,” referring to Mk.gee’s penchant for skinny jeans.
“I met him in LA and he was not what I expected…He has a kind of shyness to him, I found him really kind of introverted,” Anderson said. “Ultimately, the way in which I work is just collecting my experiences throughout the process and then kind of infiltrating them in. What is my fantasy of how I would dress him?”
Mk.gee, meet Poiret. Paul Poiret was the king of French couture over 100 years ago, who became famous for his lavish, colorful fabrics and revelatory kimono-like dresses. As Anderson explained, one day he noticed a plaque outside the Dior flagship on Avenue Montaigne dedicated to the long-dead couturier. The next day, he found a handmade Poiret dress from 1922.
Anderson’s design philosophy seems to hold that there are no right or wrong ideas for Dior, only ideas that spark his imagination and drive his hunt for newness. So he proceeded to imagine a fantasy collaboration between Christian Dior and Poiret. “Dior, he puts structure in, Poiret takes structure out,” mused Anderson, who adapted the top half of the dress for the beaded opening blouses, and digging through the Poiret archive for lavish jacquards which were rewoven and affixed like capes to overcoats and bulbous bombers jackets.
Anderson also described an affinity for the wacky formality of Poiret’s time, describing a compelling style practice you might call Poiret-maxxing. “When you look at Poiret, what I find is there was this idea of dressing up with friends, you have these moments where they're just wrapping these like blankets and duvets and things around them…And I like that idea of the character taking the cashmere coat and taking the scarf and then building something.”
I asked Anderson about the Guido Palau-designed punk wigs that every model wore: the yellow mullets and dirty grown-in bleach frizz. “I don’t want normality,” Anderson replied. “I wanted to push a character. How do you find this kind of punkishness meets Poiret meets a leaner shape? I felt it needed something that was a bit more subculture, ultimately.”
“Dior menswear is about tailoring,” Anderson said. “How do you play with it to find new shapes?” This season he looked to the rounded, elongated tailoring of the early 1940s, and the trimmer suiting of the early 1960s. As Anderson noted, these two periods hung on the cusp of change, a factor he embraced by cropping the ’40s blazer above the hips and shrinking the ’60s one even higher, until it hit crop-top-like proportions.
I’m glad you asked! There’s a buffet of Dior house codes from over the years throughout the collection, most prominently the sculpted Bar jackets, the dress-like sweaters, the D-shaped boots, and the Slimane-esque skinniness, all deconstructed and reconstructed in Anderson’s twisted collage. “People look to Dior as a fashion house, and I think it needs to be pushed. Anderson said. “Ultimately, I am not Christian Dior and I am not Dior the brand. I'm here to add a chapter to it. So for me, it's about how do you go to that dessert menu and kind of mix it all up and then try and find what is new for you in it?”