Ed Ruscha Made Shirts for Jonathan Anderson’s Dior Show in Los Angeles

Sabrina Carpenter. Miley Cyrus. Ed Ruscha?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 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.Sterling Ruby—no stranger to the fashion world—sipped 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. (“I just came from the vet!” 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 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, 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.Some backstory on the whole cruise thing: cruise or “resort” shows are the mid-season collections that keep luxury brand’s 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 fêtes for important clients who can make or break a brand’s 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’s show next week, before the traveling circus heads back to LA on June 4 for an Hermès women’s show.)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—also the first time Dior has put menswear and womenswear on the runway together—Anderson didn’t hold back. There were Saddle bags that looked like ’50s Cadillac Autobots ready to transform at any moment, a reinterpretation of a seminal John Galliano design 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’s version of a blazer Christian Dior made for Marlene Dietrich in Alfred Hitchcock’s Stage Fright. (As the midcentury star famously demanded of the director: “No Dior, no Dietrich!”) 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 “Flow,” “Star,” “Buzz,” and, of course, “Dior.”Anderson’s 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 took place in a museum-like gallery festooned with two priceless still lifes by Jean Siméon Chardin.As Vanity Fair art correspondent Nate Freeman texted when I told him about the blue-chip heavies in the house: getting the 88-year-old Ruscha out of his Culver City studio is a “huge flex.” The artist who is perhaps most synonymous with Los Angeles—and whose gas station and bold text paintings sell at auction for tens of millions of dollars—doesn’t go to fashion shows. But Anderson’s true cruise coup was much greater. Toward the end of the show, a troupe of boys emerged wearing button-up shirts created by Ruscha himself, which were embroidered with his signature punchy word art. A crisp white tuxedo shirt was splashed with thread spelling “We the people,” a riff on a 2012 Ruscha work. A tan linen shirt bearing the phrase “Says I, To Myself Says I” could have been tailored from the artist’s recent Gagosian show of the same name. A plaid shirt was covered in numbers, which Anderson described as a Ruscha-ian nod to poker.“For me, Ed is LA,” Anderson said in a preview before the show. “I wanted to do something with him for years and years and he's always said no. [Dior CEO] Delphine [Arnault] as well had tried many times, so I was given the mission to go and try to seek it out.”Though technically a collaboration, they are true Ruscha works. As Anderson told me, he sent the artists the dimensions for the shirts and Ruscha handled the rest. “He did what he wanted to do with it. He chose the fabric. He chose all the different things that he wanted, and I like that they become these sort of American icons of men's shirting.” Ruscha even wore one to LACMA’s opening gala last month—talk about a huge flex. “I think he's such a style icon,” Anderson added. “If only we all could age like Ed Ruscha!”After Anderson took a bow wearing one of the plaid poker shirts, Ruscha stood alongside Pacino to receive well wishes. “The models looked very angry,” Ruscha noted. The artist, however, appeared quite pleased with his supporting role in the evening’s Hollywood production. As he told me with a smile, “Well, I’ve never done anything like that before!”