Just days after Pope Leo visited Paris for the first time, the roads are now blocked off around the Jardin des Tuileries for another reason: Jonathan Anderson’s Spring 2027 show. Backstage, models snacking on banana bread sit with glittering winged eyes and hair mussed into salty waves. “He said I want surfing, like they’ve come from the beach or something, not too much though,” Peter Philips told me of his conversations with Anderson over the weekend, who noted “maybe something on the eye—I want fresh.”
Playing off of the collection’s fabrics of inlaid chantilly lace, double duchess satin, printed jacquard plissé, and silk mousseline, Philips was inspired by the collection’s mix of pastels with “great silver metallic trousers” and “fantastic silver shoes,” plus “something bizarre—it’s the little unexpected twist.” The creative and image director for Dior Makeup chose his own surprising materials to create 2 versions of silver surfer liner. “It’s mylar drag queen jumbo lashes,” Philips explains of trimming the hair-thin metallic filaments from a strip. The hair-thin gleaming strands are scattered in a small porcelain plate on the table next to him, and he picks one up with a pair of tweezers. “One pair of lashes will do the whole show because I only need two per girl,” he brags.
“I think that’s a very young approach,” says Philips of not making things look too done. “It’s like surf hair,” he says of hair artist Guido Palau’s faux surfer texture. “It comes by being on the beach and you actually think, oh wow, this looks great. So in a way your hair is done without any effort.” At least it’s designed to look that way. Anderson, as usual, had thoughts on what direction manicurist Ama Quashie may take. “With the nails, he was a bit more like maybe some color, maybe some red,” Philips shares of Anderson’s notes, which turned into Quashie doing a mix of Dior Vernis in a burgundy 047 Nuit shade on nails and ruby 853 Rouge Trafalgar on toes, after stylist Benjamin Bruno suggested not to match them.
“I love that it’s different,” says model Carol Monteiro, drinking a green tea nearby. It’s her fifth or sixth Dior show to walk (she can’t remember), similar to Kaat Van Herbruggen, who thinks it’s her sixth. When I ask Van Herbruggen if she’d really wear her mylar liner, “Honestly, yeah, for a party,” she says, though she admits she may not “have the skill” to do it herself. Monteiro agrees that her glitter eye is “something that you can wear to go for a night out” and while it clearly requires technique, may be something she could try from home.
“He kind of lets you kind of freestyle in a way,” says Philips of Anderson’s freedom of movement and expression when collaborating with other artists. The shine, the waves, the mismatched nails, it’s all a bit perfectly imperfect. On Anderson’s show notes, printed in the shape of the wénwán walnuts sourced from China that arrived with the show invitation, there’s a line that speaks to the feeling backstage: “What looks symmetrical in nature is often not quite,” -JA
