Before Jonathan Anderson presented Dior's Spring 2026 womenswear collection, his first for the house, he asked his guests to look back. Over a reading of Lord Byron's 1815 poem "She Walks in Beauty," the creative director screened a montage of Dior women through the decades—and through different designer eras. Runways from predecessors Maria Grazia Chiuri, Raf Simons, and John Galliano appeared; so did pop culture icons like Princess Diana, the namesake of the Lady Dior bag.
The video was Anderson's way of threading together all of Dior's chapters under one banner—a beauty that's "soft, calm, eloquent," in Byronic terms, no matter who's in charge. The poem and clips set the stage for showgoers (and fans watching the livestream with a magnifying glass) to remember the French luxury house's founding principles: liberating women through fashion, without sacrificing the fantasy it can evoke, from the cinched blazers of 1947's "New Look" to the "We Should All Be Feminists" T-shirt in 2016.
