Jonathan Anderson’s Dior Couture Meets the Art of Lynda Benglis
The creative director’s latest designs are accompanied by an exhibition at the Musée Rodin
For the Christian Dior Fall/Winter 2026–2027 Haute Couture show, Jonathan Anderson referred to one of his favorite artists and crafted a museum-level gallery show to demonstrate their connection.
It’s hard to imagine, but Haute Couture was almost a relic of the past in the 1990s. With the rise of prêt-à-porter, celebrity designers, supermodels, and casual trends prevailing, it almost went the way of eight-track tapes. Thanks to a renewed focus on craft and the rise in the number of billionaires since the millennium, Couture is hot again.
Jonathan Anderson, who showed his second Haute Couture collection for Dior in Paris on Monday, is championing the craft in his own right. He wants to bring it to the everyman, with the ethos that exposure preserves. A public exhibition of the collection, “Grammar of Forms,” opened following the show.
The British designer—a self-professed art lover who perfected the intersection of art and fashion while at Loewe—is committing to references from his favorite artists for his Haute Couture collections for Dior. After choosing ceramicist Magdalene Odundo for his debut Couture show in January, this season he turned to a longtime favorite, Lynda Benglis, an American sculptor known for resin, polyester, handmade materials, and paint, among other unorthodox materials, while sparingly adding embellishments and glitter.
“Her work takes something in motion or transformation and turns it into something confixed,” said Andrew Bonacina, an independent art curator and writer who works with Anderson and gave journalists a private tour of the exhibition.
The exhibit takes place on the show set, an open-air reception hall with black lacquered chevron flooring and tropical palm plants on loan, situated in the gardens of the Musée Rodin. It pairs Benglis’s work with pieces Anderson created and the original Christian Dior design that also informed the new style.
While this was not the first time Anderson referenced the American sculptor—Benglis’s gold sculptures graced a Loewe runway set during his tenure there—it was the first time works by Benglis inspired the collection itself. The anchor of the collection and exhibit is Benglis’s Kissel bronze wire, nickel, chrome-plated sculpture, which became a strapless silver accordion-pleated cocktail dress in the show, harkening back to a circa late 1940s strapless ivory floor-length gown. The motif also appeared on the new Cigale bag and a “helmet” headpiece.
An extravagant plissé-effect, iridescent white dress with a flounce skirt and shoulder ruffle à la 1980s LaCroix recalls works from a 1979 series using cast, pigmented paper pulp sculpted, painted, and doused with glitter, then topped off with iridescent cellophane fashioned into a pouf bow shape.
“Her work can appear baroque or even gaudy. She challenges what’s perceived as being good taste. Using glitter on a sculpture was original and quite shocking at the time. Many of her artist peers were quite confused by what she was doing, but it turned out to be one of the more radical gestures in the work,” Bonacina explained. Benglis has had studios across the globe, including Santa Fe, Greece, and India. The latter also figures heavily into the collection. A pink gown festooned with bits of décor, like fringe one might find in an Indian market, referenced Benglis’s “Peacock” series from the late 1970s, when she stayed on her patron’s estate in Ahmedabad. That series inspired Anderson to delve deeper into the 18th-century tradition of chintz.
The exploration of art mirrors that of Christian Dior, whose early career included exhibiting works by Braque, Matisse, Picasso, Dalí, and Christian Bérard in galleries, which would in turn influence his “Milieu du siècle collections. Under Anderson, artists continue to guide Maison Dior.
“Grammar of Forms” is on view from July 7—12 at the Musée Rodin, 77 Rue de Varenne, Paris 75007.