© Dior
© Dior
© Dior
Dior
Eyewear
On February 12, 1947, Christian Dior presented his first collection at 30 Avenue Montaigne. The guests sat in Napoleon III chairs whose seats were woven in rattan — a geometric grid of diagonal and crossing threads, light and precise. Dior was so taken by the pattern that he began applying it six years later, first to perfume packaging, then to fabric, then to the quilting of a bag that became the Lady Dior. In 2025, that same grid — the Cannage — is engraved on the metal temples of a pair of sunglasses. The chair became the code. The code became the frame.
1947 · 1969 · The Chair, The Code, The First Couture House In Eyewear
Christian Dior chose the Napoleon III chairs for his salons in 1947 with the decorator Victor Grandpierre — gilded wood, rattan cannage seats, placed in careful rows for the guests of his first collection. The chair's woven grid caught his attention in ways he had not anticipated. By 1951, the Cannage pattern had entered the house's haute couture designs. By 1953, it was on the packaging of the perfume L'Eau Fraîche. Decades later, it would give the Lady Dior bag its quilted surface — the pattern of the chair pressed flat into lambskin. In 1969, Dior became the first couture house to present a dedicated sunglasses collection — a gesture that positioned eyewear not as an accessory but as a continuation of the couture logic, subject to the same design intelligence as a suit or a gown. The collaboration with the American firm Tura produced frames whose cannage and oval details were drawn from the same archival vocabulary. Fifty-six years later, the Dior eyewear collection is produced by Thélios — LVMH's dedicated eyewear manufacturer in Longarone, northern Italy — and the Cannage is still there, now engraved in polished metal on the temples of the 2025 sunglasses, as precise and geometric as the chair that started everything.
Jonathan Anderson · 2025 · One Director For Everything, For The First Time In 70 Years
Jonathan Anderson was appointed creative director of Dior in 2025 — overseeing women's collections, men's collections, and haute couture simultaneously. It is the first time since Christian Dior himself that a single person has held all three. Anderson came from eleven years at Loewe, where he had transformed a quiet Spanish leather house into a globally dominant creative force through a method that was consistently archival, playful, and formally rigorous at once. His debut womenswear collection for Dior — Spring-Summer 2026, staged in a tent in the Tuileries on October 1, 2025, with a short film by Adam Curtis projected on an inverted pyramid — opened with the words: "Do you dare enter the house of Dior?" The season's eyewear arrived immediately afterward in January 2026: the MiniCD optical frame in light brown tortoiseshell acetate with a gold CD signature at the temple, and the Clover sunglasses in shiny black acetate with gray gradient lenses — finished with black lacquer clovers and a delicate ladybug in gold. The clover and the ladybug are among the lucky charms that Christian Dior carried in his pocket. Anderson found them in the archive and placed them, in enamel, on the side of a frame. The history of the house, compressed into a hinge.
The DiorCannage sunglasses are the most direct translation of the house's founding code into eyewear: the geometric rattan grid of the Napoleon III chairs, engraved in polished metal on the temples, set against a gold-finish frame. The Cannage B1U is the sunglass version — available with gray, glacier blue, or deep burgundy lenses, the CD initials worked into the temple alongside the engraved pattern. The DiorCannage O A1U is the optical counterpart, in clean coordinated finishes for daily prescription wear. Both are produced at the Thélios facility in Longarone — the same northern Italian region known for its historical eyewear manufacturing tradition — under the design direction established for the Dior 2025 collection. Maria Grazia Chiuri described the Cannage as "not just a pattern — a Dior language, a bridge between past and modernity." Anderson has continued it. The chair placed for an audience in 1947 is still in the room.
Jonathan Anderson's first Dior eyewear for Spring-Summer 2026 arrives in two formats. The Dior Clover — shiny black acetate oval frames, gray gradient lenses, finished with black lacquer clovers and a delicate gold-tone ladybug at the temple — draws directly from Christian Dior's personal superstitions: the clover for luck, the ladybug for fortune, both carried in the founder's pocket at every collection preview, now in enamel on the side of a frame. The MiniCD — a low oval in light brown tortoiseshell-effect acetate, gold CD signature at the temple, blue-light lenses as standard — is the collection's most editorial optical piece, described by editors who wore it on the streets of New York as a frame that will "take over from TikTok to the front row at fashion month." Both pieces reflect Anderson's method: the house codes found in the archive, returned to the object at the precise temperature the present moment requires.
The permanent Dior eyewear vocabulary organizes itself around the house's founding addresses and signatures. The DiorSignature frames place the name Dior as a structural element — the lettering itself becomes the hardware, the brand declaring itself through typography rather than hardware. The CDior line builds around monogrammed metal hinges. The 30Montaigne frames — named for the house's Paris address, opened in 1946 — carry the street number as their identity, a pair of sunglasses that is also a postal address. The DiorGraphique is the most minimal reading: pure lines, high contrast, no surface ornament. The Lady 95.22 translates the Lady Dior bag — itself born from the chairs of 1947 — into eyewear: the cannage quilting compressed into the curvature of the frame. Each collection within the permanent range is a different way of saying the same thing: that the house's codes are so embedded in its objects that they can survive translation into any category, at any scale, including the scale of a lens.
The MissDior eyewear collection occupies a different register within the Dior vocabulary: playful, colorful, bold in its retro references, with thick acetate frames and a palette that extends beyond the house's classic neutrals into seasonal color propositions — warm corals, pale greens, rich burgundies. The So Real sunglasses — introduced under a previous creative direction and maintained as a permanent line — brought an oversized, lens-forward format that placed the gradient glass at the center of the design rather than the frame architecture. The oval and cat-eye silhouettes in the women's collection for 2025-2026 extend the MissDior sensibility into shapes that reference the couture-era glamour of the house's founding decade: wide, screen-star proportions, a frame that occupies the face rather than completes it. These are the pieces most likely to be photographed at the corner of 57th and Madison, visible through the floor-to-ceiling glass of the House of Dior New York, held in the light of what Marino described as "an inordinate amount of New York sunlight."
The Dior men's eyewear collection draws on the same design intelligence as the women's but organizes it toward a more architectural vocabulary: geometric square fronts, dense acetate, metal frames with sharp horizontal lines, the CD monogram worked into the hinge hardware rather than placed on the temple. The CD Diamond applies t
© Dior
© Dior
© Dior
© Dior
© Dior
© Dior
© Dior
© Dior
© Dior
© Dior
© Dior
© Dior
© Dior
© Dior
DIOR
© Dior