For his debut women’s ready-to-wear collection for the house of Dior, Jonathan Anderson’s own twisted take on Dior’s back-catalogue of shoes was a neat nod to his antecedents
For his debut women’s ready-to-wear collection for the house of Dior, Jonathan Anderson was inspired, perhaps inevitably, by the storied history of the house, its fashion-shifting styles of the past. That extended, literally, from head to toe – up top, tonsured tricorns reimagined by Stephen Jones; at foot, Anderson’s own twisted take on Dior’s back-catalogue of shoes. Those were originally designed by Roger Vivier, whose work for that house for a decade from 1953 – first with Dior himself, then his successors Yves Saint Laurent and Marc Bohan – pushed shoemaking to new heights. I mean that literally, with his invention of a commercially-viable stiletto heel in 1954, lifting it from languor amongst fetishists and making it … well, a shoe you could actually do something other than lay down in. The other heels were titled ‘choc’ – shock – that curved alarmingly inwards, and ‘virgule’, translating to comma, that kicked out in back. Anderson’s ‘Whisper’ pump is so called, presumably, for an amusing allusion to rabbit ears derived from the silhouette of two elongated petals perched over the vamp. It has a neat nod to those aforementioned antecedents, as well as a ‘whisper’ of a specific Vivier shoe from around 1960, held in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum. In grand Dior tradition, those backwards-glances, today, somehow look new.
The Dior Whisper pump is available to buy here.
