Fashion Inhabits the Earth

From 6 to 9 July, Paris became the stage for the Autumn‑Winter 2026–2027 Haute Couture collections. Two shows stand out, suspend the temporality of criticism, and unappealably renew the contemporary aesthetic canon. They are linked to two emblematic figures on today’s scene: Jonathan Anderson and Matthieu Blazy.

For Dior, Jonathan Anderson translates the language of materiality of the American post‑minimalist sculptor Lynda Benglis, celebrated for her pleated sculptures in aluminium, bronze and metal alloys, for her colourful paper sculptures, and for having interpreted and declined the form of the knot, which she described in 2014 as follows: “My work is an expression of space. What is the experience of movement? Is it painterly? Is it an object? A feeling? It all comes from my body. I am the clay; I have been extruded, in a sense. How to tie this together. I don’t need to make a knot. The forms of knots in my early work expressed this idea. I am the form.”

As soon as he arrived at Dior, Jonathan Anderson invested—in the German sense of besetzen “occupy”—the form of the knot, brushing it off from the maison’s iconographic heritage. Romantic bow necklaces and bow pochettes in irresistible pastel tones immediately appeared in the prêt‑à‑porter collections. This time, the knot sheds its romantic component and becomes sharp, hypnotic, impactful. It reappears in magnetic creations in pleated fabric, gilded, silvered, or in the vivid colours of chintz, the cotton cloth of Indian origin introduced into Europe between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and later produced locally, drawing inspiration from Indian savoir‑faire. This element makes it possible to tie together a traditional component of Dior’s creations, the famous toile de Jouy, itself a type of chintz produced from 1759 in the town of Jouy‑en‑Josas, and one of the themes running through this latest Dior collection: the Indian city of Ahmedabad, capital of Gujarat, a place dear to Lynda Benglis.

The knot on the jackets shown on the runway acts as a concentrator of attention. The eye is wholly drawn toward this element, from which coloured vanishing lines radiate, matter in galactic expansion. Unlike previous shows, the material of this haute couture défilé is not ethereal; the gaze comes to rest on it and is captured. The body that inhabits it is protected; it has finally reached the ultimate stage of a metamorphosis towards beauty, like Lynda Benglis’s multi‑coloured butterfly sculptures (Butterflies, 2015). These are intellectual butterflies, both Benglis’s and Anderson’s. Try to fly without first having experienced the soul’s embrace of the heaviness of matter! Look 38 is perfection: the sky‑blue lamé pleated jacket is dotted with patches of fuchsia, azure and gold, as often happens on the wings of the butterflies of New Mexico, where Lynda Benglis lived for a long time and which is home to almost three hundred butterfly species, making it one of the three American states most densely populated by and welcoming to butterflies. Everything converges towards a voluminous bow fastening the garment at the front and resting on a pencil skirt, likewise pleated, which evolves downward into a balloon shape. Its white is iridescent and the light tinges it with a soft pink. With this haute couture show, Jonathan Anderson continues to weave the bond between fashion and vegetal and animal life. Wearing butterfly dresses, carrying flower or armadillo minaudières, means inhabiting the earth by adapting to its needs, avoiding every form of invasiveness and practising mimicry.

© Francesca Manzari