If you were labouring under the delusion that Haute Couture is just about polite tulle and sensible hemlines, Jonathan Anderson’s debut for Dior is here to respectfully (but firmly) shatter your illusions. Taking over the Musée Rodin — a venue that knows a thing or two about sculpting bodies — the Maison’s Creative Director presents Grammar of Forms, an exhibition on view through February 2 that feels less like a retrospective and more like a sartorial seismic shift.
Forget the revered archives; this is an experimental laboratory. Anderson has staged a curatorial ménage à trois of design, placing his own creations in direct dialogue with Monsieur Dior’s mid-century architectural masterpieces and the hypnotic, burnished ceramics of Dame Magdalene Odundo. It is a flex that connects the dots between clay vessels and the vessel of the body itself, proving that the “fragile chains of human knowledge” are still very much intact — and looking chicer than ever.
Anderson has dived into the Dior lexicon, those legendary proportions and structural obsessions, and remixed them with the urgency of the now. Odundo’s hand-built sculptures, with their bulbous, anthropomorphic curves, serve as the spiritual anchor. You can see their influence in Anderson’s new silhouettes: exaggerated tensions, waistlines that defy gravity, and fabrics treated with such technical mastery they almost look ceramic. It is a study in tactility where the boundaries between ‘wearing’ and ‘inhabiting’ a garment blur.
What makes this exhibition unmissable is how it reframes tradition as a provocation. Anderson isn’t just paying homage to the atelier; he is interrogating it. He treats the New Look not as a museum piece, but as raw material for a new radicality. This isn’t just clothes on mannequins; it’s a masterclass in the poetics of sculpture. It reminds us that true luxury is the ultimate slow-cooked antidote to our fast-fashion fatigue. By marrying the monumental with the intimate, Anderson has proven that the French Maison has yet more to say about the current situation.
If you are in Paris, don’t miss this opportunity. Absorb the craftsmanship, the monolithic beauty, and the sheer audacity of it all. If not, just know: the Dior girl is no longer just a flower; she is the whole vase.
The exhibition Grammar of Forms is on view through February 2 at the Musée Rodin, 77 Rue de Varenne, Paris.
