One of the most compelling aspects of Jonathan Anderson’s first year at Dior has been the way he distorts and collapses notions of time. Since his arrival, the pendulum has swung between 18th-century Chardin paintings, late-20th-century Warhol portraits of Lee Radziwill and Jean-Michel Basquiat, and the new campaign imagery he creates for the house with David Sims, already forming the visual imprint of his tenure. His collections, too, revisit and playfully subvert design codes from Dior’s almost 80-year history, from Monsieur Dior’s Bar jacket onwards. For Anderson, the past is there to be mined, referenced across decades and centuries, and reassembled into something sharply of the present. This was one of many themes we explored with Jonathan during the hours of interviews he graciously accorded us for this issue’s cover story. Time’s elasticity surfaced repeatedly: in conversation with Yorn Michaelsen, Christian Dior’s design assistant in the 1950s, Jonathan reflected on the house’s origins; with Tim Blanks, Jennifer Lawrence, Magdalene Odundo and Sims, he spoke of the realities of implementing his five-year vision for Dior that binds heritage and modernity into one continuous proposition. Elsewhere, time assumes different guises. Amanda Harlech reflects on a career spanning John Galliano’s early ferocity and her years with Karl Lagerfeld at Chanel. In a portfolio shot by Juergen Teller at Glyn Cywarch, the 17th-century seat of the Harlech family in north Wales, she wears this season’s collections mixed with her own archive pieces, styled by her daughter Tallulah – generations in dialogue, her enigmatic style undimmed by time. Miguel Castro Freitas, Mugler’s new creative director, recalls sketching his first collection at the tender age of six, and discovering Thierry Mugler’s futurist work as a teenager in Portugal through his local TV guide – a glimpse that foreshadowed his path to the house. In our interview and accompanying scrapbook of personal archive imagery, he reflects on how those early influences shape his balancing of Mugler’s theatrical heritage with a modern sensibility attuned to our times. And from ARCHIVISM’s reframing of vintage luxury for a new Chinese audience to Will Welch’s reinvention of GQ towards a timely ‘New Masculinity’, this 25th issue of System considers time not as something that passes, but as something we shape, and are shaped by in return.
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