Couture and Lauren Sánchez are everywhere in Paris as Dior and Schiaparelli mix wonder and wit

PARIS (AP) — Dior turned the Musée Rodin into a celebrity waiting room — then into a garden — on the first day of Paris Couture Week.

Guests packed into the museum as the start time for the show drifted.

French first lady Brigitte Macron arrived. Lauren Sánchez Bezos swept in. Parker Posey twirled in her trench-dress.

And then the whole room, celebrities and editors alike, sat and waited for Rihanna.

When the pop-star finally took her seat, the lights dropped on a suspended ceiling hung with a garden of flowers.

Gravity did its quiet work: a bloom loosened and fell to the floor.

It was a fitting opening image for Jonathan Anderson’s first Dior haute couture show: beauty under pressure.

Dior’s showman does everything at once

Anderson, the Northern Irish designer who revived Loewe with craft and wit, is now doing something Dior has never asked of one person in the modern era: he commands menswear, womenswear and couture at once.

That scale matters.

Dior is one of the main engines of the luxury conglomerate LVMH, and couture is where a house shows its power.

The collection was pitched as “nature in motion,” with technique treated as living knowledge, not museum display. Anderson followed that logic, reworking fragments of the past into something meant to feel new.

From the start, the palette was disciplined — blacks, whites and ecru — then punctured by flashes of color and texture. Line...