Dior’s Fall/Winter 2026 haute couture show opened alongside Grammar of Forms, an exhibition at the Musée Rodin pairing the collection with pieces from the Dior archive and actual sculptures by Lynda Benglis, the American artist Jonathan Anderson built the entire show around. Benglis spent decades turning flat, ordinary materials, latex, wax and mesh into folded, knotted three-dimensional forms. Anderson took that idea and went through 66 looks, reworking old Dior silhouettes into something closer to sculpture than clothing. The whole collection held together in a way that's rare to see, the setting, the craft, the references all pulling in the same direction, so nothing felt like it was there just because it looked good next to something else. It's one of those couture collections where the concept behind the show actually holds up once you look past the show  notes and at the clothes themselves. 

Anderson built the show around two places where Benglis has actually lived and worked—Gujarat, India and Santa Fe, New Mexico. Her peacock series was inspired by the birds she observed while staying at the Sarabhai family estate in Ahmedabad in 1979. Anderson staged this against the desert of the American southwest—monsoon against desert. It’s a well thought out structure, not just a designer throwing references at a collection.  

Look 20 was my personal favourite out of the whole collection. It featured a chlorophyll green, fern fringed Bar Jacket paired with a pearlescent pleated organza skirt. Anderson remodelled Christian Dior’s structural Bar Jacket and softened it with a vibrant green tweed and frayed fringe. The green was pulled from the lush greens in Benglis’s poured latex work.  My favourite aspect of this look was the delicate purple flower embroidery tying back to the peacock series and the chintz craftsmanship behind it. 

The clothes got the headlines; however, the jewellery is where the show actually said something. The pieces made by artisans in both France and India, including Jaipur, use mother-of-pearl, rock crystal and carved green onyx threaded onto tasselled cords called dori, with mosaics drawn from antique Indian textile florals. Researching Benglis’s Peacock series led Anderson into 18th-century Indian chintz, the hand-painted cotton fabrics that quietly shaped European fashion for centuries and now scraps of actual antique chintz show up on the Petit Dîner and mini Lady Dior bags. 

The important thing here isn’t the material itself, luxury fashion often borrows craft techniques from different parts of the world. It’s that Dior actually acknowledged where it came from. Anderson credited the artisans himself through an Instagram post: “Jaipur has been renowned for gemstone and jewellery expertise for three centuries, and local artisans reimagined traditional designs for this collection.” 

This may not seem like a huge deal, and it shouldn’t be, but it is. Naming a region and crediting them for their work is not the norm in an industry that has spent years borrowing traditional craft and calling it inspiration. The real question is not whether Dior did something well—it is whether doing it once signifies anything for an industry that has never had to. 

Fashion has been here before: a designer does the right thing once, gets praised for it, and nothing structural changes because nobody asked what “right” would need to look like beyond a single season. Crediting people requires naming where something comes from. Here, that credit didn't even come from Dior's official channels, it came from Anderson's own Instagram. Dior named Jaipur, not the individual artisans who actually carved the onyx or braided the dori. Naming Jaipur is the beginning of accountability, not the finish line, and it’s worth being honest that the applause for clearing that bar says more about how low the bar has been than about how high Dior just jumped. 

Whether this becomes standard practice or remains a one-off incident tied to Anderson’s own interests is genuinely not answerable yet. This was a really good collection, one of the strongest arguments yet for Anderson at Dior, and it didn't need the Jaipur credit to work. That it included one anyway is what makes it worth talking about. But for one afternoon at the Musée Rodin, surrounded by Benglis's own sculptures, Jaipur's dori cords and rock crystal weren't a footnote to the spectacle. They were the spectacle. The next couture season, and whoever sits in Anderson's chair after him, will tell us whether that was policy or just this one, particular room.