PARIS (AP) — Rihanna, Jennifer Lawrence, Rosalía and Cynthia Erivo watched from the front row Tuesday as Dior's Jonathan Anderson showed 65 spring looks on a runway stretched across a pond in the Tuileries Garden — a collection built on the idea that the most expensive way to get dressed is to stop halfway.
Trees rose from the water and fog drifted over the models — artificial mist pumped out on an afternoon when Paris hit 82 degrees Fahrenheit (28 degrees Celsius).
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Rihanna, centre, and Camille Cottin, centre right, watch the Christian Dior Womenswear Spring Summer 2027 collection presented in Paris, France, Tuesday, Sept. 29, 2026. (AP Photo/Thomas Padilla)
A model wears a creation as part of the Christian Dior Womenswear Spring Summer 2027 collection presented in Paris, France, Tuesday, Sept. 29, 2026. (AP Photo/Thomas Padilla)
A model wears a creation as part of the Christian Dior Womenswear Spring Summer 2027 collection presented in Paris, France, Tuesday, Sept. 29, 2026. (AP Photo/Thomas Padilla)
Models wear creations as part of the Christian Dior Womenswear Spring Summer 2027 collection presented in Paris, France, Tuesday, Sept. 29, 2026. (AP Photo/Thomas Padilla)
A model wears a creation as part of the Christian Dior Womenswear Spring Summer 2027 collection presented in Paris, France, Tuesday, Sept. 29, 2026. (AP Photo/Thomas Padilla)
The opening look set the terms: a white pinstriped double-breasted jacket over a striped shirt and a short cream skirt, nothing tucked, nothing fastened with conviction.
Bras showed beneath open jackets, shirts were buttoned unevenly and pajama piping ran along the edges of tailoring.
Even the hems looked windswept before the wind arrived.
It was a long way from the house Christian Dior founded in 1946 and made famous a year later with the New Look: the Bar jacket, waist pulled tight, skirt swallowing yards of fabric.
Anderson, who took over in 2025 as the first designer since Dior himself to handle womenswear, menswear and couture, has been turning it into the "loose look" ever since.
The show notes framed this season as a question — “how light can a dress be?” — and answered it by treating tailoring like drapery.
Bar jackets went soft, their peplums — the flounce at a jacket’s waist — slumped rather than sculpted; one was crossed with a barn coat.
Houndstooth, a house classic, dissolved into sheer chiffon.
The 1952 La Cigale dress returned in strapless pink pleated tulle, flaring at the hips like the cicada it is named for.
Archive pieces, the notes promised, would be “articulated in new ways.” Mostly they were.
It was deliberate dishevelment, a mood running through the whole fashion month, at Prada and elsewhere.
Luxury hid in the seams — Murano glass buttons, faux fur under a lapel, visible only when the collar is popped — while spectacle sat in plain sight: jackets and miniskirts covered in hundreds of hand-cut petals that shivered as models walked.
Bronze, silver and mint-green trousers cut through a palette of black, white and gray.
The saddle bag, a hit of the John Galliano years, is back.
The invitation came with a pair of wenwan walnuts, traditionally rolled in the palm for years until they develop a polish — beauty through handling, a fitting metaphor for clothes this crumpled.
It also pointed to the collection’s weakness. This was Anderson’s 10th Dior outing in barely more than a year, and its silhouette — the ballooning chiffon mini, the see-through tailoring, the single dangling earring — is by now familiar before the first model appears.
Fashion’s oldest trick is surprise — and Anderson’s is refinement, which sells.
Whether it is what fashion wants from Dior is a question the fog could not hide.
“Long before a tree unfurls its branches toward the sky,” the notes said, “the walnut holds the knowledge of its own form.”
Ten collections in, the same is true of Anderson’s Dior: either a house that has found itself, or one that has stopped looking.
Rihanna, centre, and Camille Cottin, centre right, watch the Christian Dior Womenswear Spring Summer 2027 collection presented in Paris, France, Tuesday, Sept. 29, 2026. (AP Photo/Thomas Padilla)
A model wears a creation as part of the Christian Dior Womenswear Spring Summer 2027 collection presented in Paris, France, Tuesday, Sept. 29, 2026. (AP Photo/Thomas Padilla)
A model wears a creation as part of the Christian Dior Womenswear Spring Summer 2027 collection presented in Paris, France, Tuesday, Sept. 29, 2026. (AP Photo/Thomas Padilla)
Models wear creations as part of the Christian Dior Womenswear Spring Summer 2027 collection presented in Paris, France, Tuesday, Sept. 29, 2026. (AP Photo/Thomas Padilla)
A model wears a creation as part of the Christian Dior Womenswear Spring Summer 2027 collection presented in Paris, France, Tuesday, Sept. 29, 2026. (AP Photo/Thomas Padilla)
Iran’s currency fell to a new record low on Tuesday, with traders in Tehran exchanging more than 2.5 million rials to the U.S. dollar in a stark reflection of how the war in the Middle East has steadily eroded the Iranian economy.
The latest decline came just 27 days after the rial hit its previous record low of 2.2 million to the dollar on Sept. 2. The currency has repeatedly reached new lows since the war began in February.
The Iranian economy has been under duress for years in the face of international sanctions. But a U.S. naval blockade on Iranian oil and new sanctions imposed since the start of the war have sent it into free fall.
Meanwhile, Iran’s top diplomat said indirect negotiations with the United States aimed at reopening the critical Strait of Hormuz have become “more serious,” while the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps’ chief spokesman Gen. Hossein Mohebbi on Tuesday called on Americans to take to the streets and protest the conflict.
Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi told Iranian media late on Monday that the “current focus is solely on the Strait of Hormuz,” the chokepoint of the war.
Araghchi made the comments shortly before departing New York — where he attended last week’s gathering of world leaders at the U.N. General Assembly — and after meeting with Pakistani and Qatari mediators.
Araghchi said the Qatari intermediaries were expected to soon engage with the U.S. side.
“They are set to raise the matter with the American side once more, after which the final U.S. response will be conveyed to us,” Araghchi said. “If there is a response, the Qataris will convey it to us and a decision will be made in Tehran on that basis.”
Officials, including from the U.S., have confirmed to The Associated Press that mediators are working with Iran and the U.S. on trying to broker a deal to end the fighting and open the strait.
The mediation efforts continue even after U.S. President Donald Trump earlier this week spurned an Iranian proposal to reopen the strait in seven days if the U.S. agreed to lift its blockade of Iranian ports, release frozen Iranian assets and waive sanctions on Iranian oil sales, among other conditions.
Tensions in the Strait of Hormuz were underscored by a report Tuesday that a cargo vessel was struck by an “unknown projectile” while moving through the strait on Monday. The United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations said it had received a delayed report from a third party.
The strike caused a fire on board that was extinguished, UKMTO said, and all crew members were reported safe, UKMTO said. The vessel, which wasn't identified, continued on its way, the report said. There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack.
The Trump administration said Tuesday that 10 individuals and entities based in Iran, Hong Kong and Pakistan now face sanctions over accusations of procuring weapons and weapon components for Iran’s defense ministry as it fights its now seven-month war against the U.S.
The United States is targeting people and companies around the globe that it accuses of being financial facilitators or enablers of Iran’s military supply chain, pushing ahead with economic warfare against Tehran at a time when renewed diplomacy between the two countries remains uncertain.
The latest action by the Treasury Department is part of the administration’s “Operation Economic Outcast” campaign, aimed at severing “critical financial lifelines” for the already heavily sanctioned Iranian government.
“Treasury will not tolerate any support to the regime and will continue to identify, expose, and isolate Iran’s enablers,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in a statement.
The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps on Tuesday made an appeal to everyday Americans to push their government to end the U.S. war against Iran, a provocative message that comes just weeks before critical midterm elections in the United States.
Mohebbi, the Guard spokesman, read a letter during a news conference in Iran's capital, Tehran, appealing to Americans to pressure their government and claiming that the only way for the war to end is for Washington to admit defeat and leave the Mideast.
Mohebbi’s remarks come as Trump’s Republican Party faces fierce headwinds as it looks to maintain control of Congress. But polling shows the war has darkened the American electorate’s mood ahead of the Nov. 3 election in which elevated gasoline prices, a byproduct of the conflict, loom large.
Mohebbi also accused the U.S. of using Iran’s nuclear program as a ruse to “plunder Iran’s wealth” and to turn the country “back into a colony.”
He added that the U.S. and others failed in their belief that military and economic action would get Tehran to submit and that Washington “has no choice but to acknowledge defeat and leave the region.”
“This is how the war will end,” he said.
Trump and his top aides are insistent that Iran’s economy cannot sustain a conflict much longer and have expressed confidence that Tehran will be forced to capitulate.
The U.S. president predicted soon after launching the war that the conflict would last a matter of weeks. More recently, he’s said that the war will likely end after the November elections in the U.S.
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio in a Monday appearance on Fox News said Iran was heading toward an economic “cataclysm.” Administration officials say that a combination of new sanctions and a U.S. naval blockade aimed at preventing Iranian oil from going to market are having the intended effect.
“And so when you’re denying them money through oil sales and sanctions, you’re not just punishing them,” Rubio said. “You are preventing them from getting access to money that they will use to try and kill Americans and others around the world and their own people and build weapons and threaten the world and ultimately break out to a nuclear weapon program."
In a separate development, a crucial oil pipeline in Saudi Arabia that was shuttered by the kingdom earlier this month after coming under attack is once again operating, according to a Saudi government official.
The official, who was not authorized to comment publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity, said operations are near pre-attack levels and that the pipeline should be running at full capacity within a few weeks.
The kingdom relies on the East-West Pipeline, which runs the breadth of the country, to move its crude from oil processing facilities on the Gulf to ports on its western, Red Sea coast. From there it can be put on tankers for export.
Saudi Arabia blamed an Iran-backed militia in Iraq for the drone attack that forced the temporary shutdown of the 1,200-kilomeer (745-mile) pipeline.
Satellite imagery indicated tankers on Sunday loaded some 12.5 million barrels of oil at the Yanbu export terminal, which is supplied by the East-West Pipeline, and the nearby terminal at Al Muajjiz, the data and analytical firm Kpler said in a report.
Associated Press writer David McHugh in Frankfurt, Germany contributed reporting.
Iranian missiles and banners showing portraits of the Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, right, and the late armed forces commanders, who were killed in Israeli and U.S. strikes, are displayed in a military exhibition commemorating the anniversary of the start of the 1980-88 Iraq-Iran war at Baharestan Square, in Tehran, Monday, Sept. 28, 2026. (AP Photo/Vahid Salemi)
Iran's Revolutionary Guard spokesman Gen. Hossein Mohebbi speaks during a news conference in Tehran, Iran, Tuesday, Sept. 29, 2026. (AP Photo/Vahid Salemi)
Iran's Revolutionary Guard spokesman Gen. Hossein Mohebbi speaks during a news conference in Tehran, Iran, Tuesday, Sept. 29, 2026. (AP Photo/Vahid Salemi)
Motorbikes drive past Iranian missiles and banners showing portraits of the Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, center, and the late armed forces commanders and nuclear scientists, who were killed in Israeli and U.S. strikes, displayed in a military exhibition commemorating the anniversary of the start of the 1980-88 Iraq-Iran war at Baharestan Square, in Tehran, Monday, Sept. 28, 2026. (AP Photo/Vahid Salemi)
