Sabrina Carpenter. Miley Cyrus. Ed Ruscha?<\/p>\n
The Dior show at LACMA on Wednesday evening had the kind of starry front row you would expect when a luxury house lands in Tinseltown for a special cruise collection. In fact, it seemed like half of Hollywood had descended from their mansions in the Hills for the 900-person event. But Jonathan Anderson<\/a> also brought out a swathe of art-world royalty whose names could be found just upstairs, pinned to the gallery walls in the brand new Peter Zumthor-designed David Geffen Galleries, which cantilevered directly above the runway.<\/p>\n Sterling Ruby\u2014no stranger to the fashion world\u2014sipped a glass of champagne as the golden light faded over the set, designed to look and feel like a Hollywood backlot, with old school convertibles parked around vintage LA streetlights. (\u201cI just came from the vet!\u201d Ruby noted as he brushed dog hair off his cardigan.) Larry Gagosian waited for the show to begin nearby, while several members of his roster, including Lauren Halsey<\/a> and Mary Weatherford, milled around. George Condo and Urs Fisher apparently slipped in relatively incognito next to celebs like Role Model, Mikey Madison, and Anya Taylor-Joy. Ruscha<\/a>, the founding father of SoCal pop art, leaned in to chat with his seatmate, Al Pacino, who then got up to shake hands with Evan Spiegel and Miranda Kerr. It was the kind of high-vibrational cultural confluence that Anderson musters everywhere he goes.<\/p>\n Some backstory on the whole cruise thing: cruise or \u201cresort\u201d shows are the mid-season collections that keep luxury brand\u2019s retail stores stocked in between the main spring and fall deliveries. Nowadays, these one-offs have become a major feature of the fashion calendar, as cruise shows grow into increasingly elaborate and far-flung f\u00eates for important clients who can make or break a brand\u2019s bottom line. (Chanel just held a cruise show in Biarritz, and many European editors are now settling in for an extended tour of the all-important American market: Gucci is cruising in New York City on Saturday, followed by a Louis Vuitton women\u2019s show next week, before the traveling circus heads back to LA on June 4 for an Herm\u00e8s women\u2019s show.)<\/p>\n Given the purpose of pre-collections, which is to sell, they are also often laced with novelty and splashy collaborations that VICs will clamor to get their hands on. And for his first-ever cruise show\u2014also the first time Dior has put menswear and womenswear on the runway together\u2014Anderson didn\u2019t hold back. There were Saddle bags that looked like \u201950s Cadillac Autobots ready to transform at any moment, a reinterpretation of a seminal John Galliano design<\/a> from 2001. There was an overcoat printed with a noirish shadow effect, as if hit by light through upturned shutters, that called to mind the American Gigolo poster. There was a slim men\u2019s version of a blazer Christian Dior made for Marlene Dietrich in Alfred Hitchcock\u2019s Stage Fright. (As the midcentury star famously demanded of the director: \u201cNo Dior, no Dietrich!\u201d) There were glamorous ripped skinny jeans, the stringy bits cleverly replaced by fine filaments of silver chains. Several of the models donned feathery crowns made by the legendary Irish milliner Philip Treacy that spelled out \u201cFlow,\u201d \u201cStar,\u201d \u201cBuzz,\u201d and, of course, \u201cDior.\u201d<\/p>\n Anderson\u2019s LA sojourn could only really have gone down at LACMA. Anderson is a cinephile who side quests as a costume designer for Luca Guadagnino films, but he is also the most art-obsessed designer working today. (And there is stiff competition in that department.) He is a passionate and dynamic collector who used his previous role at Loewe to work with his favorite artists like Lynda Benglis and Richard Hawkins; his Dior debut<\/a> took place in a museum-like gallery festooned with two priceless still lifes by Jean Sim\u00e9on Chardin.<\/p>\n