Jonathan Anderson made his most consequential statement yet as Dior’s creative director Wednesday night, staging the house’s Cruise 2027 collection at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in a show that felt less like a runway presentation than a love letter to California mythology.

Guests were seated in the LACMA courtyard among monolithic curving cement walls, streetlamps and vintage convertibles as the bassline from Air’s “Sexy Boy” ricocheted off hard concrete while convertible headlights washed over glitter-slicked gowns and metallic knits.  The setting — LACMA’s newly opened David Geffen Galleries, designed by Pritzker Prize–winning architect Peter Zumthor — was itself a declaration of intent, a collision of fashion, art and architecture that announced Anderson as a designer playing an entirely different game than his predecessors.

The front row read like a Hollywood power grid. Miley Cyrus, Sabrina Carpenter, Miles Teller and Anya Taylor-Joy all posed for photos on arrival, joined by Mikey Madison, Tracee Ellis Ross, Macaulay Culkin, Taylor Russell, Miranda Kerr and LaKeith Stanfield, along with a slew of industry top execs, like Amazon’s Sue Kroll, Legendary’s Blair Rich, UTA’s Dan Constable and uber-producer Brian Grazer.  

Al Pacino, Jeff Goldblum, Leslie Mann and Maude Apatow, Gia Coppola, Lauren Hutton and Dior executive Delphine Arnault rounded out a crowd that underscored the house’s deliberate strategy of blurring the lines between fashion and Hollywood royalty. Carpenter wore a buttery yellow ruffled dress from the collection itself, while Taylor-Joy flashed a little black dress and Cyrus, newly blonde, kept things conspicuously casual in denim on denim.

The fashion house supplied everyone with little Dior blankets to shield them from the chill.

On the runway, Anderson conjured a Los Angeles that is equal parts glamour and shadow. A seemingly endless procession of 75 models emerged in looks evoking Hollywood icons — Marilyn Monroe, Sophia Loren, Audrey Hepburn — in shimmering, fringed and layered designs, off-the-shoulder silhouettes and ruffled scarves, while in menswear, the focus shifted to sharp geometric shadowing and grey wool flannels recalling the film noir genre.  

Some models wore dramatic feathered hats spelling out “Dior” in large, stylized lettering, adding a playful architectural note, while others arrived in a buttercup-yellow dress embellished with rosettes or a gown of layered orange ruffles inspired by the California poppy, the state flower.

The after party at the Chateau Marmont, equally voguish, was filled with its own models — like Miranda Kerr — along with hordes of other young Hollywood fashionistas. In fact, it got so packed, with dancing bodies spilling out of the lobby, that some guests — like Jeff Goldblum and Tracee Ellis Ross — cut out early.

For Anderson, the night was his most fully realized argument so far that the house he now runs — the first designer to oversee all of Dior’s divisions since Monsieur Dior himself — is ready for something genuinely new.